Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review

Abstract

The increasing availability of music in digital format needs to be matched by the development of tools for music accessing, filtering, classification, and retrieval. The research area of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) covers many of these aspects. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of this vast and new field. A number of issues, which are peculiar to the music language, are described-including forms, formats, and dimensions of music-together with the typologies of users and their information needs. To fulfil these needs a number of approaches are discussed, from direct search to information filtering and clustering of music documents. An overview of the techniques for music processing, which are commonly exploited in many approaches, is also presented. Evaluation and comparisons of the approaches on a common benchmark are other important issues. To this end, a description of the initial efforts and evaluation campaigns for MIR is provided.

Music information seeking behaviour as motivator for musical creativity

“…Personal music collection; music libraries; music archives; music stores; museums; academic music institutions; conservatories; orchestras; philharmonics; choirs; professional associations; Clarke (1973), Duggan (1992), Gottlieb (1994), Casey and Taylor (1995), Kuyper-Rushing (1999), Cunningham (2002), Downie and Cunningham (2002), Cunningham et al (2003), Ho (2004), Lee and Downie (2004), Richardson and Giustini (2004), Taheri-Panah and MacFarlane (2004), Laplante and Downie (2006), Liew and Ng (2006), Orio (2006), Salavuo (2006), Cunningham et al (2007), Ho (2007), Hunter (2006), Inskip et al (2008a), Inskip et al (2008b), Lesaffre et al (2008), Cunningham and Nichols (2009), Tepper and Hargittai (2009), Inskip et al (2010, Laplante (2010a), Laplante (2010b)...…”

“…,Lee et al (2005),Laplante and Downie (2006),Liew and Ng (2006),Orio (2006),Salavuo (2006), Ho (2007), Lee et al (2007), Hunter (2006), Inskip et al (2008b), Lesaffre et al (2008), Tepper and Hargittai (2009), Inskip et al (2010), Lai and Chan (2010), Laplante (2010a), Laplante (2010b), Lee (2010), Wöllner et al (2010), Lam (2011), Laplante and Downie (2011), Dougan (2012), Inskip et al (2012), Lee and Waterman (2012), Kostagiolas et al (2015)…”

Music Information Retrieval: Recent Developments and Applications

“…The field of MIR has undergone considerable changes during recent years. Dating back to 2006, Orio [186] presented one of the earliest survey articles on MIR, targeted at a general Information Retrieval audience who is already familiar with textual information. Orio does a great job in introducing music terminology and categories of music features that are important for retrieval.…”

“…Besides contextual MIR and evaluation, considerable progress has been made in the tasks listed in Table 1.1. Some of them even emerged only after the publication of [186]; for instance, auto-tagging or context-aware music retrieval.…”

Sound and Music Computing: Research Trends and Some Key Issues

“…Research is now increasingly focusing on how musically relevant structures are identified directly from the audio signal. This research on musically relevant audio descriptors is driven mainly by the new application field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) (Orio, 2006). Currently available methods fall short as veridical models of music perception (even of isolated structural dimensions), but they are already proving useful in practical applications (e.g.…”