Music Query: Methods, Models, and User Studies (Computing in Musicology)

The field of music query has grown from tentative beginnings in bibliographical systems of earlier decades to a substantial area of interdisciplinary studies in little more than a decade. This volume assembles recent studies from Europe and North America concerned with the query and analysis of musical data. Among these, methods for the synchronization of sound and symbolic data, for automatic analysis through perceptual rules, and for computing a "transportation" distance for thematic comparison are described. The modeling of rhythmic motifs, of melodic traits, and of cognitive distance are discussed. User studies report on human preferences in modes of query (humming vs. tapping, etc.) and on the comparative success rates of more than two dozen proposed metrics for melodic comparison.