Searching digital music libraries

There has been a recent explosion of interest in digital music libraries. In particular, interactive melody retrieval is a striking example of a search paradigm that differs radically from the standard full-text search. Many different techniques have been proposed for melody matching, but the area lacks standard databases that allow them to be compared on common grounds--and copyright issues have stymied attempts to develop such a corpus. This paper focuses on methods for evaluating different symbolic music matching strategies, and describes a series of experiments that compare and contrast results obtained using three dominant paradigms. Combining two of these paradigms yields a hybrid approach which is shown to have the best overall combination of efficiency and effectiveness.