A detailed description of two controlled experiments concerning the usefulness of assertions as a means for programming

Assertions or more generally "Programming by contract" have gained widespread acceptance in the computer science community as a means for correct program development. However, the literature lacks an empirically evaluation of the benefits a programmer gains by using assertions in his software development. This paper reports about two controlled experiments to close this gap. Both experiments compared "Programming by contract" to the traditional programming style without assertions. The evaluation suggests that assertions tend to decrease the programming effort and that assertions lead to more reliable programs compared to those programs written without using them

Searching notated polyphonic music using transportation distances

We present a method for searching databases of symbolically represented polyphonic music that exploits advantages of transportation distances such as continuity and partial matching in the pitch dimension. By segmenting queries and database documents, we also gain partial matching in the time dimension. Thus, we can find short queries in long database documents, and have a method more robust against pitch and tempo fluctuations in the queries or database documents than we would with transportation distances alone. We compare our method with three algorithms from the C-Brahms project by Lemström et al. and with PROMS by Clausen et al. and find that our method is more generally usable, retrieves a higher number of relevant documents than all three compared algorithms, and that it is faster than C-Brahms. This is the first comparative study of these algorithms involving a large database with about half a million of documents

An Interface for Melody Input

This article contributes to the set of input modes available for use with computers by presenting the design, implementation, and evaluation of Tuneserver, a melody recognition system that acts as a robust listening expert for musical themes

Two controlled Experiments Concerning the Usefulness of Assertions as a Means for Programming

Assertions, or more generally "Programming by contract", have gained widespread acceptance in the computer science community as a means for correct program development. However, the literature lacks an empirical evaluation of the benefits a programmer gains by using assertions in his software development. This paper reports two controlled experiments that close this gap. Both experiments compare "Programming by contract" to the traditional programming style without assertions

A measure for evaluating retrieval techniques based on partially ordered ground truth lists

For the RISM A/II collection of musical incipits (short extracts of scores, taken from the beginning), we have established a ground truth based on the opinions of human experts. It contains correctly ranked matches for a set of given queries. These ranked lists contain groups of documents whose ranks were not significantly different. In other words, they are only partially ordered. To make use of the available information for measuring the quality of retrieval results, we introduce the “average dynamic recall ” (ADR) that averages the recall among a dynamic set of relevant documents, taking into account the fact that the ground truth reliably orders groups of matches, but not always individual matches. Dynamic recall measures how many of the documents that should have appeared before or at a given position in the result list actually have appeared. ADR at a given position averages this measure up to the given position. Our measure was first used at the MIREX 2005 Symbolic Melodic Similarity contest

A Survey of Music Information Retrieval Systems

This survey paper provides an overview of content-based music information retrieval systems, both for audio and for symbolic music notation. Matching algorithms and indexing methods are briefly presented. The need for a TREC-like comparison of matching algorithms such as MIREX at ISMIR becomes clear from the high number of quite different methods which so far only have been used on different data collections. We placed the systems on a map showing the tasks and users for which they are suitable, and we find that existing content-based retrieval systems fail to cover a gap between the very general and the very specific retrieval tasks