 Music information retrieval using audio input |
Smith, L. A., McNab, R. J., Witten, I. H. (1996) Proc AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Integration and Use of Text, Image, Video, and Audio Corpora,Stanford, CA, pp 12-16. |
This paper describes a system designed to retrieve melodies from a database on the basis of a few notes sung into a microphone. The system first accepts acoustic input from the user, transcribes it into common music notation, then searches a database of 9400 folk tunes for those containing the sung pattern, or patterns similar to the sung pattern; retrieval is ranked according to the closeness of the match. The paper presents an analysis of the performance of the system using different search criteria involving melodic contour, musical intervals and rhythm; tests were carried out using both exact and approximate string matching. Approximate matching used a dynamic programming algorithm designed for comparing musical sequences. Current work focuses on developing a faster algorithm. |