Polyphonic Score Retrieval Using Polyphonic Audio Queries: A Harmonic Modeling Approach

Abstract

This paper extends the familiar “query by humming” music retrieval framework into the polyphonic realm. As humming in multiple voices is quite difficult, the task is more accurately described as “query by audio example,” onto a collection of scores. To our knowledge, we are the first to use polyphonic audio queries to retrieve from polyphonic symbolic collections. Furthermore, as our results will show, we will not only use an audio query to retrieve a known item symbolic piece, but we will use it to retrieve an entire set of real-world composed variations on that piece, also in the symbolic format. The harmonic modeling approach which forms the basis of this work is a new and valuable technique which has both wide applicability and future potential.