Creative professional users musical relevance criteria

Although known item searching for music can be dealt with by searching metadata using existing text search techniques, human subjectivity and variability within the music itself make it very difficult to search for unknown items. This paper examines these problems within the context of text retrieval and music information retrieval. The focus is on ascertaining a relationship between music relevance criteria and those relating to relevance judgements in text retrieval. A data-rich collection of relevance judgements by creative professionals searching for unknown musical items to accompany moving images using real world queries is analysed. The participants in our observations are found to take a socio-cognitive approach and use a range of content and context based criteria. These criteria correlate strongly with those arising from previous text retrieval studies despite the many differences between music and text in their actual content

Challenges in cross-cultural/multilingual music information seeking

Understanding and meeting the needs of a broad range of music users across different cultures and languages are central in designing a global music digital library. This exploratory study examines cross-cultural/multilingual music information seeking behaviors and reveals some important characteristics of these behaviors by analyzing 107 authentic music information queries from a Korean knowledge search portal Naver (knowledge) iN and 150 queries from Google Answers website. We conclude that new sets of access points must be developed to accommodate music queries that cross cultural or language boundaries

Toward a theory of music information retrieval queries: System design implications

This paper analyzes a set of 161 music-related information requests posted to the rec.music.country.old-time newsgroup. These postings are categorized by the types of detail used to characterize the poster's information need, the type of music information requested, the intended use for the information, and additional social and contextual elements present in the postings. The results of this analysis suggest that similar studies of 'native' music information requests can be used to inform the design of effective, usable music information retrieval interfaces

Organizing digital music for use: an examination of personal music collections

Current research on music information retrieval and music digital libraries focuses on providing access to huge, public music collections. In this paper we consider a different, but related, problem: supporting an individual in maintaining and using a personal music collection. We analyze organization and access techniques used to manage personal music collections (primarily CDs and MP3 files), and from these behaviors, to suggest user behaviors that should be supported in a personal music digital library (that is, a digital library of an individual's personal music collection)

Usability of Musical Digital Libraries: a Multimodal Analysis.

There has been substantial research on technical aspects of musical digital libraries, but comparatively little on usability aspects. We have evaluated four web-accessible music libraries, focusing particularly on features that are particular to music libraries, such as music retrieval mechanisms. Although the original focus of the work was on how modalities are combined within the interactions with such libraries, that was not where the main difficulties were found. Libraries were generally well designed for use of different modalities. The main challenges identified relate to the details of melody matching and to simplifying the choices of file format. These issues are discussed in detail. 1

A Lyrics-matching QBH System for Interactive Environments

(Abstract to follow

A Concept for Using Combined Multimodal Queries in Digital Music Libraries

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοIn this paper, we propose a concept for using combined multimodal queries in the context of digital music libraries. Whereas usual mechanisms for content-based music retrieval only consider a single query mode, such as query-by-humming, full-text lyrics-search or query-by-example using short audio snippets, our proposed concept allows to combine those different modalities into one integrated query. Our particular contributions consist of concepts for query formulation, combined content-based retrieval and presentation of a suitably ranked result list. The proposed concepts have been realized within the context of the PROBADO Music Repository and allow for music retrieval based on combining full-text lyrics search and score-based query-by-example search