Proceedings of the IEEE Multimedia Computing and Systems Int. Conf., Firenze, (Italy), pp. 457-462. A Combinatorial Approach to Content-based Music Selection

Abstract

Advances in networking and transmission of digital multimedia data will bring soon huge catalogues of music to users. Accessing these catalogues raises a problem for users and content providers, that we define as the music selection problem. We introduce three main goals to be satisfied in music selection: match user preferences, provide users with new music, and exploit the catalogue in an optimal fashion. We propose a novel approach to music selection, based on computing coherent sequences of music titles, and show that this amounts to solving a combinatorial pattern generation problem. We propose constraint satisfaction techniques to solve it. The resulting system is an enabling technology to build better music delivery services. 1. Music Delivery and Selection Music delivery concerns the transportation of music in a digital format to users. Music delivery has recently benefited from technological progress in networking and signal processing. In particular, progress in networking transmission, compression of audio, and protection of digital data [7] allow now or in the near future to deliver quickly and safely music to users in a digital format through networks, either internet, or digital audio broadcasting. Additionally, digitalization of data makes it possible today to transport information on content, and not only data itself, as exemplified by the Mpeg-7 project [9]. All these techniques give users, at home, access to huge catalogues of annotated music. These techniques address the distribution problem, but also raise the problem of choosing among these catalogues. In the case of music, a typical database of titles contains about 500.000 titles ([1, 10]). A database containing all tonal music recordings would probably reach 4 millions titles. Ethnic music and less “standard” types of music would probably double or triple this number. Every month, about 4000 CDs are created in western countries