Access to ethnic music: Advances and perspectives in content-based music information retrieval

Access to digital music collections is nowadays facilitated by content-based methods that allow the retrieval of music on the basis of intrinsic properties of audio, in addition to advanced metadata processing. However, access to ethnic music remains problematic, as this music does not always correspond to the Western concepts that underlie the currently available content-based methods. In this paper, we examine the literature on access to ethnic music, while focusing on the reasons why the existing techniques fail or fall short of expectations and what can be done about it. The paper considers a review of the work on signals and feature extraction, on symbolic and semantic information processing, and on metadata and context tools. An overview is given of several European ethnic music archives and related ongoing research projects. Problems are highlighted and suggestions of the ways in which to improve access to ethnic music collections are given.