A notation-based query language for searching in symbolic music
Pages 79 - 83
Abstract
Existing systems for searching in symbolic music corpora generally suffer from either of two limitations: they are either limited in power because they accept only simple search patterns, or they are hard for musicologists and musicians to use because they require knowledge of programming and text processing tools. In this paper, we propose a new music query language that combines the best of both worlds: it is powerful enough to express a wide variety of complex search patterns, while at the same time being easy to use for musicologists and musicians because it is entirely based on standard music notation.
Our query system consists of several components. First, we define extensions of standard music notation that constitute the primitives of our musicological query language, such as pitch-only matching, rhythm-only matching, note grouping, and so on. Users may arbitrarily combine these primitives to create complex queries. Second, we define an XML-based encoding scheme that is an extension of Music Encoding Initiative in order to represent and store queries digitally. We then present an execution engine that runs XML-encoded queries against a corpus of music and produces search results. Finally, we describe a graphical interface that allows users to input queries and examine their results.
The main use case of our system is searching in corpora of monophonic music such as song melodies, folk tunes, musical themes, and solo instrumental music. In comparison with existing symbolic music search tools, our query language makes advanced searching more accessible to a wide audience of musicologists and musicians.
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Published: 09 November 2019
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DLfM '19
DLfM '19: 6th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology
November 9, 2019
The Hague, Netherlands
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Overall Acceptance Rate 27 of 48 submissions, 56%
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