Searching notated polyphonic music using transportation distances

  • Authors:

  • Rainer Typke;Remco C. Veltkamp;Frans Wiering

  • Affiliations:

  • Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands;Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands;Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We present a method for searching databases of symbolically represented polyphonic music that exploits advantages of transportation distances such as continuity and partial matching in the pitch dimension. By segmenting queries and database documents, we also gain partial matching in the time dimension. Thus, we can find short queries in long database documents, and have a method more robust against pitch and tempo fluctuations in the queries or database documents than we would with transportation distances alone. We compare our method with three algorithms from the C-Brahms project by Lemström et al. and with PROMS by Clausen et al. and find that our method is more generally usable, retrieves a higher number of relevant documents than all three compared algorithms, and that it is faster than C-Brahms. This is the first comparative study of these algorithms involving a large database with about half a million of documents.