Searching digital music libraries 1 Running head: SEARCHING DIGITAL MUSIC LIBRARIES Searching digital music libraries

There has been a recent explosion of interest in digital music libraries. In particular, interactive melody retrieval is a striking example of a search paradigm that differs radically from the standard full-text search. Many different techniques have been proposed for melody matching, but the area lacks standard databases that allow them to be compared on common grounds—and copyright issues have stymied attempts to develop such a corpus. This paper focuses on methods for evaluating different symbolic music matching strategies, and describes a series of experiments that compare and contrast results obtained using three dominant paradigms. Combining two of these paradigms yields a hybrid approach which is shown to have the best overall combination of efficiency and effectiveness. Searching digital music libraries 3 Searching digital music libraries Corresponding author: David Bainbridge Phone: +64 7 838 4407 Fax: +64 7 858 5095 E-mail: [email protected] A shorter version of this paper was presented at International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, Singapore, December 2002.