Showing papers by "J. Stephen Downie published in 2002"

Interdisciplinary Communities and Research Issues in Music Information Retrieval.

Abstract: Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is an interdisciplinary research area that has grown out of the need to manage burgeoning collections of music in digital form. Its diverse disciplinary communities have yet to articulate a common research agenda or agree on methodological principles and metrics of success. In order for MIR to succeed, researchers need to work with real user communities and develop research resources such as reference music collections, so that the wide variety of techniques being developed in MIR can be meaningfully compared with one another. Out of these efforts, a common MIR practice can emerge.

Toward a theory of music information retrieval queries: System design implications

Abstract: This paper analyzes a set of 161 music-related information requests posted to the rec.music.country.old-time newsgroup. These postings are categorized by the types of detail used to characterize the poster's information need, the type of music information requested, the intended use for the information, and additional social and contextual elements present in the postings. The results of this analysis suggest that similar studies of 'native' music information requests can be used to inform the design of effective, usable music information retrieval interfaces.

Informetric analysis of a music database

Abstract: We analyse the statistical properties a database of musical notes for the purpose of designing an information retrieval system as part of the Musifind project. In order to reduce the amount of musical information we convert the database to the intervals between notes, which will make the database easier to search. We also investigate a further simplification by creating equivalence classes of musical intervals which also increases the resilience of searches to errors in the query. The Zipf, Zipf-Mandelbrot, Generalized Waring (GW) and Generalized Inverse Gaussian-Poisson (GIGP) distributions are tested against these various representations with the GIGP distribution providing the best overall fit for the data. There are many similarities with text databases, especially those with short bibliographic records. There are also some differences, particularly in the highest frequency intervals which occur with a much lower frequency than the highest frequency “stopwords” in a text database. This provides evidence to support the hypothesis that traditional text retrieval methods will work for a music database.

Workshop on the creation of standardized test collections, tasks and metrics for music information retrieval (MIR) and music digital library (MDL) evaluation

Abstract: This workshop is designed to engage the participation of all those interested in MIR and MDL research and evaluation. Interested parties have been encouraged to submit formal "White Papers" outlining their individual perspectives on what needs to be done to create meaningful MIR and MDL test collections, retrieval tasks and evaluation metrics. Interested parties include musicologists, music theorists, audio-retrieval experts, symbolic-retrieval experts, librarians, lawyers, and business representatives. The compilation of these perspectives and the discussion that follows at the workshop are intended to form the bedrock upon which a solid foundation of future research can be built.

Representing Traditional Korean Music Notation in XML.

Abstract: XML promises to provide a powerful interoperable general framework for the development of music representation systems. Unfortunately current XML encoding systems for music focus almost exclusively on Western music from the 17 century onwards, and on the Western notation system, Common Music Notation (CMN). This is regrettably limiting, with cultural, theoretical, and practical consequences for MIR. In order to ensure that music information retrieval (MIR) systems have full theoretic generality, and wide practical application, we have begun a project to explore the representation, in XML, of a genre of traditional Korean music which has a distinctive notation system called Chôngganbo. Our project takes seriously the specific notational expression of musical intention and intends to ultimately contribute to the analysis of theoretical issues in music representation, as well as to the improvement of methods for representing Korean music specifically.