An Application of Weighted Transducers to Music Information Retrieval

In this paper it is proposed a methodology for retrieving music documents using a query by example paradigm. The basic idea is that a collection of music documents can be indexed by the set of melodic contours of its documents, and retrieval is carried out using an approximate matching between query and document contours. The approximate matching is based on the use of Weighted Transducers, which model the document contours and are used to compute their similarity with the query. The methodology has been evaluated on a collection of documents and with a set of audio queries.