Evaluation of a simple and effective music information retrieval method

We developed, and then evaluated, a music information retrieval (MIR) system based upon the intervals found within the melodies of a collection of 9354 folksongs. The songs were converted to an interval-only representation of monophonic melodies and then fragmented t into length-n subsections called n-grams. The length of these n-grams and the degree to which we precisely represent the intervals are variables analyzed in this paper. We constructed a collection of `musical word' databases using the text-based, SMART information retrieval system. A group of simulated queries, some of which contained simulated errors, was run against these databases. The results were evaluated using the normalized precision and normalized recall measures. Our concept of `musical words' shows great merit thus implying that useful MIR systems can be constructed simply and efficiently using pre-existing text-based information retrieval software. Second, this study is a formal and comprehensive evaluation of a MIR system using rigorous statistical analyses to determine retrieval effectiveness.