Content-based indexing of musical scores
Abstract
We describe a method of automatically creating a content-based index of musical scores. The goal is to capture the themes, or motifs, that appear in the music. The method was tested by building an index of 25 orchestral movements from the classical music literature. For every movement, the system captured the primary theme, or a variation of the primary theme. In addition, it captured 13 of 28 secondary themes. The resulting index was 14% of the size of the database. A further reduction of 2% is possible; however, this discards secondary themes. A listening experiment using five orchestral movements showed that people can reliably recognize secondary themes after listening to a piece of music-therefore, it may be necessary to retain secondary themes in a score index.
Department(s)
Computer Science
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/JCDL.2003.1204840
Keywords
Indexing, Software libraries
Publication Date
1-1-2003
Recommended Citation
Medina, Richard A., Lloyd A. Smith, and Deborah R. Wagner. "Content-based indexing of musical scores." In 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 2003. Proceedings., pp. 18-26. IEEE, 2003.
Journal Title
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
