Towards an Integrated Approach to Music Retrieval

This paper describes a research work on peer-to-peer music search based on the combination of content based descriptors and textual metadata. The envisaged scenario is the one of a user who searches for documents according either to their melodic and rhythmic content, and to additional information about the title, the instrumentation, or tempo in the form of textual metadata. Two different overlay networks are used to deal with music content and text. A user interface has been developed, which allows the user to perform a query, to merge the results using alternative approaches, and to listen to the retrieved music documents.