MIR in ENP - Rule-based Music Information Retrieval from Symbolic Music Notation

Symbolic music information retrieval is one of the most underrepresented areas in the field of MIR. Here, symbolic music means common practice music notation–the musician readable format. In this paper we introduce a novel rule-based symbolic music retrieval mechanism. The Scripting system–ENP-Script–is augmented with MIR functionality. It allows us to perform sophisticated retrieval operations on symbolic musical scores prepared with the help of the music notation system ENP. We will also give a special attention to visualization of the query results. All the statistical queries, such as histograms, are visualized with the help of common music notation where appropriate. N-grams and more complex queries–the ones dealing with voice leading, for example– are visualized directly in the score. Our aim is to demonstrate the power and expressivity of the combination of common music notation and a rulebased scripting language through several challenging examples.