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Robust Polyphonic Music Retrieval with N-grams

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Abstract

In this paper we investigate the retrieval performance of monophonic and polyphonic queries made on a polyphonic music database. We extend the n-gram approach for full-music indexing of monophonic music data to polyphonic music using both rhythm and pitch information. We define an experimental framework for a comparative and fault-tolerance study of various n-gramming strategies and encoding levels. For monophonic queries, we focus in particular on query-by-humming systems, and for polyphonic queries on query-by-example. Error models addressed in several studies are surveyed for the fault-tolerance study. Our experiments show that different n-gramming strategies and encoding precision differ widely in their effectiveness. We present the results of our study on a collection of 6366 polyphonic MIDI-encoded music pieces.

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Doraisamy, S., Rüger, S. Robust Polyphonic Music Retrieval with N-grams. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 21, 53–70 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023553801115

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