A framework for flexible querying and mining of musical audio archives

In this paper the outline of a framework for the handling of flexible querying and mining of musical audio archives is presented. This framework has been designed within the scope of the DEKKMMA-project, which aims to build a digital musical audio archive for the ethnomusicological department of the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa. This museum holds one of the largest and world wide most important collections of music from Central Africa. Beside the digitizing and recording aspects, efficient access facilities for both specialized and nonspecialized users are required. In order to achieve this, the framework supports and integrates flexible querying, classification and object comparison mechanisms.