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[help-GIFT] Extensions to MRML and support for music retrieval


From: Reiss. Dr J
Subject: [help-GIFT] Extensions to MRML and support for music retrieval
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 15:06:21 +0100

I am posting this just to the mailing list and assuming that Henning, Stephane, 
David and Wolfgang are all on the list.
First off, thanks for all your comments. It seems that the best way for me to 
get started is to get something installed and working on my system like GIFT or 
the benchathlon kit and then play around with it. I'll inevitably run into a 
few problems since I'm primarily a Windows C programmer and it looks like you 
guys prefer Perl and Linux. 
Now to reply to some of the comments-
Integrating music retrieval into the Benchathlon is an excellent idea. Indeed 
benchmarking issues have become a serious goal of the music IR community. And 
MRML is also useful because most proposed testbeds circumvent the copyright 
issues by storing audio on a secure server where high quality audio is never 
allowed to leave. Thus we need a good communications protocol for sending 
queries to the secure server.
Interfaces for music retrieval are basically set up in different ways for every 
single music retrieval package that has been set up. An excellent list has been 
compiled at http://mirsystems.info/ . Most of the systems are experimental (a 
few are proprietary, commercial systems) so little attention has been paid to 
user interface. 
Since the MIR community comprises musicologists, librarians, computer 
scientists and signal processing people, it is safe to assume that systems 
exist on a wide variety of platforms and implemented in many different 
development environments. As a minimum, we should be able to work with people 
who use Windows, Mac and Linux, and who develop in Matlab, C, C++, Java and 
Perl. There are also some development environments that are very specific to 
audio, such as CSound and VST, and those may require plug-ins.
Whether we do query by example depends on your definition of QBE. One branch of 
MIR systems are known as query by humming, query by singing, query by 
whistling, ..., systems. Here, one hums a few seconds of music. This is then 
translated into a monophonic pitch representation. Retrieved documents are 
typically best matched midi files (i.e., a symbolic, not audio representation) 
or else just the song title. Other systems use a small snippet of polyphonic 
music (5 -15 seconds) and then use feature extraction to find a best match. One 
problem with this is that the best features capture timbral information, not 
rhythmic or melodic information. This implies that two very different songs 
played on the same instruments is usually a higher match than the same song 
played on different instruments.
The biggest difference between Music Retrieval and CBIR is that there is 
typically no feedback. The reasoning is simple- it takes seconds to look at 
images and attach relevance judgements, but it would take minutes to listen to 
several snippets of music and determine their relevance.
Retrieval quality can be judged in different ways depending on the type of 
system. Most queries (such as "find me music that sounds like..." ) would best 
be evaluated TREC style. But a few are binary questions (such as "what is the 
name of this song") and the system either finds it or doesn't. I suppose that 
can be evaluated by determination of how many errors there are in the query 
before the question cannot be answered.
But all those questions about the uniqueness of music retrieval systems are 
interested and fun, and must wait until I have some implementation of MRML 
working before I deal with them

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