Geospatial Location of Music and Sound Files for Music Information Retrieval

A relatively new avenue of Web-based information retrieval research, intended to semantically improve information extraction, is the idea of using geographical information to accurately locate resources. This paper introduces a technique for locating sound and music files geographically. It uses information extracted from the Web relating to audio resources and combines it with geospatial location data to provide new information about audio usage in various countries. The results presented here illustrate the enormous potential for MIR to use the vast amount of audio materials on the Web within a physical and geographical context. Statistics of audio usage around the world are provided, as well as examples of other applications of these techniques.