PROMS: A Web-based Tool for Searching in Polyphonic Music

One major task of a digital music library (DML) is to provide techniques to locate a queried musical pattern in all pieces of music in the database containing that pattern. For a survey of several computational tasks related to this kind of data retrieval we refer to Crawford et al. [3]. Existing DMLs like MELDEX [1], Themefinder [4], and the Sonoda-Muraoka-System [7] work with melody databases relying on score-like information. Retrieval and matching are performed in a fault-tolerant way by string-based methods which mainly take into account pitch information. Generally, rhythm plays only a subordinate role. The music dictionary of Barlow and Morgenstern [2] shows that music retrieval based on pitch information only leads to results with typically too many false matches. (An example of such absurd matches is given in Selfridge-Field [6], p. 27.) We are convinced that both pitch and rhythm are crucial for recognizing melodies. In the more general context of polyphonic music, one is ev...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ISMIR
• Authors: Michael Clausen, R. Engelbrecht, D. Meyer, J. Schmitz
• Keywords: ISMIR 2000, Music, Polyphonic Music, Web-based Computer-music Service