Music Analysis and Retrieval Systems for Audio Signals

The constantly increasing amount of audio available in digital form necessitates the development of software systems for analyzing and retrieving digital audio. In this work, we describe our efforts in developing such systems. More specifically, we describe the design philosophy behind our approach, the specific problems we try to solve, and how we evaluate the performance of our algorithms. Automatic music analysis and retrieval of non-speech digital audio is a relatively new field, and the existing techniques are far from perfect. To improve the performance of the developed techniques, two main techniques are used: (1) integration of information from multiple analysis and retrieval algorithms and (2) the use of graphical user interfaces that enable the user to provide feedback to the design, development, and evaluation of the algorithms. All the developed algorithms and user interfaces are integrated under MARSYAS, a software framework for research in computer audition