Comparing Aural Music-Information Retrieval Systems

Aural queries, often called “query by humming”, are a popular input to music information-retrieval systems. These systems perform a complex series of operations, from transcribing input to retrieving pieces. We suggest a test-bed needs to represent each data-processing stage, from initial transcription of an audio query, to the relevancy ranking of each piece in the database compared to a particular query. Such a multi-stage dataset would let each research group concentrate on the portion of the task most interesting to that group, while at the same time providing training and testing data for each component of the system. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. 39