We consider two content-based music retrieval problems
where the music is modeled as sets of points in the Euclidean
plane, formed by the (on-set time, pitch) pairs. We
introduce fast filtering methods based on indexing the underlying
database. The filters run in a sublinear time in the
length of the database, and they are lossless if a quadratic
space may be used. By taking into account the application,
the search space can be narrowed down, obtaining practically
lossless filters using linear size index structures. For
the checking phase, which dominates the overall running
time, we exploit previously designed algorithms suitable for
local checking. In our experiments on a music database,
our best filter-based methods performed several orders of a
magnitude faster than previous solutions
