An approach to sheet music information retrieval
The paper presents a sheet music retrieval system. A search query is written in MusicXML format. MusicXML is a very popular format for sheet music, supported by various music notation software. With the appearance of large electronic collections the problem of music retrieval becomes particularly important. Known information retrieval methods are not directly applicable for this particular domain: the task differs from the structured retrieval in texts because, for example, two sheet music files with totally different symbolic content may represent the same composition written in different keys or arranged for different instruments. Our search starts from a fragment containing a melody or a part of a composition and the goal is to find the whole composition in a digital collection. The collection should be preliminary indexed and the index is stored as database. For MusicXML files we propose a software tool that performs indexing automatically. For other formats the indexing process can be performed manually and database is extended by means of SQL-queries. To perform a fuzzy search we mark the longest common subsequence in the query and index item and then to remove their differences using automated reasoning method called rippling. The appropriate rewriting rules and differences annotation techniques for musical notation are implemented in prototype sheet music retrieval system.