A Dictionary Based Indexing Approach for Music Information Retrieval

Abstract

With the rapid progress of storage technologies and communication networks, there has been an explosive growth of digital music information. How to organize and search large scale music collection is one of the most fundamentally challenging research problems. According to the musical form structure and repetition rule of musical theme, repeating patterns can be regarded as the representation of musical themes. Statistical analysis indicates that repeating patterns in music collection also follow Zipf's law. Therefore we introduce a dictionary based indexing approach to organize and index music collection, where the musical dictionary comprises repeating patterns. Then all music melodies are partitioned into words using forward or backward word segmentation method with the musical dictionary. Experimental results reveal that the proposed indexing method can be applied to music information retrieval effectively, and possesses obvious advantages when the scale of music collection increases drastically.