The MUSART Testbed for Query-By-Humming Evaluation

Evaluating music information retrieval systems is acknowledged to be a difficult problem. We have created a database and a software testbed for the systematic evaluation of various query-by-humming (QBH) search systems. As might be expected, different queries and different databases lead to wide variations in observed search precision. "Natural" queries from two sources led to significantly lower performance than that typically reported in the QBH literature. These results point out the importance of careful measurement and objective comparisons to study retrieval algorithms. We compare string-matching, contour-matching, and hidden Markov model search algorithms in this study. An examination of scaling trends is encouraging: precision falls off very slowly as the database size increases. This trend is simple to compute and could be useful to predict performance on larger databases

A system for automatically annotating traditional Irish music field recordings

This paper presents MATT2 (Machine Annotation of Traditional Tunes). MATT2 is a novel system which can automatically annotate field recordings of traditional Irish music with useful metadata such as tune name, key signature, time signature, composer and discography. MATT2 works by using a number of algorithms to automatically transcribe digital audio to be annotated to the ABC music notation language. It then compares these transcriptions against a corpus of 860 human made transcriptions in ABC using a variation of the edit distance algorithm. Results using MATT2 to annotate fifty recordings of flute and fiddle tunes demonstrate a high success rate at annotating recordings made by different musicians. Additionally, several of the recordings successfully annotated in testing MATT2 were recorded in imperfect conditions, with badly degraded audio

The effect of using pitch and duration for symbolic music retrieval

Quite reasonable retrieval effectiveness is achieved for retrieving polyphonic (multiple notes at once) music that is symbolically encoded via melody queries, using relatively simple pattern matching techniques based on pitch sequences. Earlier work showed that adding duration information was not particularly helpful for improving retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we demonstrate that defining the duration information as the time interval between consecutive notes does lead to more effective retrieval when combined with pitch-based pattern matching in our collection of over 14 000 MIDI files

Effectiveness of note duration information for music retrieval

Content-based music information retrieval uses features extracted from music to answer queries. For melodic queries, the two main features are the pitch and duration of notes. The note pitch feature has been well researched whereas duration has not been fully explored. In this paper, we discuss how the note duration feature can be used to alter music retrieval effectiveness. Notes are represented by strings called standardisations. A standardisation is designed for approximate string matching and may not capture melodic information precisely. To represent pitches, we use a string of pitch differences. Our duration standardisation uses a string of five symbols representing the relative durations of adjacent notes. For both features, the Smith-Waterman alignment is used for matching. We demonstrate combining the similarity in both features using a vector model. Results of our experiments in retrieval effectiveness show that note duration similarity by itself is not useful for effective music retrieval. Combining pitch and duration similarity using the vector model does not improve retrieval effectiveness over the use of pitch on its own

Exploring microtonal matching

Most research intomusic information retrieval thus far has only examined music from the western tradition. However, music of other origins often conforms to different tuning systems. Therefore there are problems both in representing this music as well as finding matches to queries from these diverse tuning systems. We discuss the issues associated with microtonal music retrieval and present some preliminary results from an experiment in applying scoring matrices to microtonal matching

MIRMaid: An interface for a content based Music Information Retrieval test-bed

Music Information Retrieval (MlR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music and includes influences from different areas, like music perception and cognition, music analysis, signal processing, music indexing and information retrieval [Futrelle & Downie, 2003]. To produce the most efficient MlR systems, test-beds are commonly used to test different combinations of parameters against each other. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the composition of algorithms for MlR systems by constructing an interface that could form part of a test-bed. It differs from other interfaces and frameworks that are used in MlR test-beds because it is focused on small scale test-beds. MIRMaid is an acronym for Music Information Retrieval Modular aid and is an interface that allows different content based retrieval tasks to be compared against each other to find optimal combinations of retrieval parameters for specialised problem domains. The dissertation describes the process of how the MIRMaid interface was developed, modified and refined. A big challenge was to design the user experiments in a way that considered potential users of the interface while using the test subjects I had at my disposal. I decided to use the simplest queries to highlight basic similarities between novice and potential expert users. The performance of the interface was judged by user ratings on a questionnaire. The interface performed reasonably well with expert users and novice users. Despite these results there were a few interesting observations that were returned from the user experiments related to the experiment design and the task explanations. Some suggestions are also provided for extending the interface to allow it to be used with other types of data. The possibility is also investigated for using the interface as a tool for simplifying the process of integrating modules from different sources