In Search of a Lost Melody
In Search of a Lost Melody
For many decades, librarians have been compiling catalogues of the melodies or themes of musical works. In such a catalogue it is easy to discover that, e.g., the familiar sequence of musical pitches "G G G Eb" comes from (the starting phrase) of Beethoven's 5th symphony. But what if the theme is not remembered correctly or the excerpt does not occur at the beginning of the phrase? These problems are overcome through automated music identification. Such identification techniques can be used in a query-by-humming system to retrieve musical documents in large digital music databases. But what is the applied methodology in such a system? What kind of databases are featured, and how fast can they perform?