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

• Main Authors: M. Clausen, R. Engelbrecht, D. Meyer, J. Schmitz
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2000
• Subjects: Barlow; Crawford; DML
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.12.708; http://ismir2000.ismir.net/papers/clausen_abs.pdf

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 even forced to consider pitch and rhythm information. PROMS, a web-based computer-music service under development at the University of Bonn, Germany, is part of the MiDiLiB project [5]. The aim of PROMS is to design and to implement PROcedures for Music Search. Our discussion will take place in a rather general setting: we assume that our database contains several kinds of music such as polyphonic and homophonic music as well as melodies. We also use score-like information. A query to the database is a fragment of a piece of music. This could be a melody or a certain figure of an accompaniment. The task is now to locate e#ciently all occurences of this fragment in all pieces of music in the database.