An approximate string matching algorithm for content-based music data retrieval

An approach for content based music data retrieval is proposed. In this approach, thematic feature strings, such as melody strings, rhythm strings, and chord strings are extracted from the original music objects and treated as the meta data to represent their contents. The problem of content based music data retrieval is then transformed into the string matching problem. A new approximate string matching algorithm is also proposed which provides fault tolerance ability according to the music characteristics. To show the efficiency of the algorithm, a set of experiments are performed to compare with the agrep and the fgrep utility on both synthetic and real music data