Introduction to the focused issue on music DLs

Abstract

This focused issue on Music Digital Libraries of the International Journal of Digital Libraries aims at putting in tighter communication of related research areas that offer plenty of potential for combination andmutual inspiration, yet are only rarely combined froma research perspective:Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Digital Libraries (DLs) technology. MIR is a research area that has a primary focus on content-based access and retrieval of music documents. Since the initial approaches based on the query-by-example paradigm, described also as query-by-hummingwhen themusical query was provided by the user directly by singing an excerpt of the melody, MIR research community enlarged its scope to include the recommendation (both of individual music documents and of sequences of songs organized in a playlist), genre classification, artist identification, and automatic tag generation and many other tasks. Other topics related to MIRaremore related tomusic processing, aimed at improved access to music content. To this end, research topics that are related to MIR include segmentation and structure analysis of music documents, both in symbolic and audio formats, track separation and transcription from audio, beat and tempo tracking, instrument identification.