TOWARDS ORGANIZING AND RETRIEVING CLASSICAL MUSIC BASED ON FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS FOR BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORDS (FRBR)

Music is one of the most popular categories in general public’s Web search. Compared to other types of information retrieval, music search requires a different approach. This is due to the fact that music information includes many unique elements such as composers, performers, instruments, and various media formats, which could make it difficult for the users to realize that there may be related or even duplicated music information available in a different format. Therefore, the methods of organization and presentation for music information become significant in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is considered an effective model for representing the relationships between musical works and organizing the information of musical works. The goals of this dissertation are twofold. First, I adopted FRBR as a model to represent classical music and propose additional attributes and relationships through user studies to enrich music information for users. Second, I examined, through user studies, how the FRBR model improves MIR compared to existing keyword-based retrieval methods. In order to achieve these two goals, three phases of studies are designed. The first phase examined users’ perspectives toward FRBR representation and elicited their views on the importance of certain attributes and relationships in describing bibliographic records of classical music work. Phase 2 involved a content analysis of Web users’ questions regarding classical music information obtained from Yahoo! Answers, which aimed to further understand Web users’ information needs for classical music information and to examine whether the FRBR-based classical music representation is adequate for satisfying those needs. The third phase examined users’ retrieval performance and perceptions with FRBR-based music retrieval in comparison with FRBR-like search method using objective and subjective measures that are based on usability characteristics. This study has two primary contributions. First, it proposed an extended FRBR-based classical music representation model, CMFRBR, which was derived through interaction with music experts, information experts, and general music seekers. Second, it examines user experiences and system performance of classical music information retrieval using CMFRBR based search system compared to FRBR-like music retrieval system on the Web in multiple dimensions