A query by musical impression system using N-gram based features

Impression-based music retrieval is not suitable for retrieving specific musical pieces from the huge volume of a music database, but enables users to find musical pieces that suit their preferences, feelings, or mental states. We have therefore been developing an impression-based music retrieval system that enables this. In this paper, we define the form of vectors that numerically express impressions of musical pieces, and propose a method of generating such a vector from a musical piece. The most significant attribute of this method is that it uses n-gram statistics of information on pitch, strength, and length of every tone in that musical piece as features extracted from it. We also present the results of evaluating the performance of the system