Representing a significant shift from methods that employ bibliographic metadata for music retrieval, modern Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research seeks to utilize characteristics of music to search databases of musical content via musically expressed queries. These investigations hold significant promise for the future development of commercial and research applications such as searchable databases of popular tunes on the web and databases of historical music. However the challenges are diverse, encompassing music cognition, storage and processing, and traditional information retrieval (IR) issues. This paper focuses on IR issues in MIR, discussing various approaches to music representation and matching techniques. Prototype MIR systems Meldex, Semex, Themefinder and Arthur are briefly described.
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