Music Indexing and Retrieval for Multimedia Digital Libraries

This chapter addresses the problem of the retrieval of music documents from multimedia digital libraries. Some of the peculiarities of the music language are described, showing similarities and differences between indexing and retrieval of textual and music documents. After reviewing the main approaches to music retrieval, a novel methodology is presented, which combines an approximate matching approach with an indexing scheme. The methodology is based on the statistical modeling of musical lexical units with weighted transducers, which are automatically built from the melodic and rhythmic information of lexical units. An experimental evaluation of the methodology is presented, showing encouraging results.