Music Information Retrieval: Recent Developments and Applications surveys the young but established field of research that is Music Information Retrieval (MIR). In doing so, it pays particular attention to the latest developments in MIR, such as semantic auto-tagging and user-centric retrieval and recommendation approaches. Music Information Retrieval: Recent Developments and Applications starts by reviewing the well-established and proven methods for feature extraction and music indexing, from both the audio signal and contextual data sources about music items, such as web pages or collaborative tags. These in turn enable a wide variety of music retrieval tasks, such as semantic music search or music identification ("query by example"). Subsequently, it elaborates on the current work on user analysis and modeling in the context of music recommendation and retrieval, addressing the recent trend towards user-centric and adaptive approaches and systems. A discussion follows about the important aspect of how various MIR approaches to different problems are evaluated and compared. It concludes with a discussion about the major open challenges facing MIR.

Sound waves propagate through various media, and allow communication or entertainment for us, humans. Music we hear or create can be perceived in such aspects as rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, or mood. All these elements of music can be of interest for users of music information retrieval systems. Since vast music repositories are available for everyone in everyday use (both in private collections, and in the Internet), it is desirable and becomes necessary to browse music collections by contents. Therefore, music information retrieval can be potentially of interest for every user of computers and the Internet. There is a lot of research performed in music information retrieval domain, and the outcomes, as well as trends in this research, are certainly worth popularizing. This idea motivated us to prepare the book on Advances in Music Information Retrieval. It is divided into four sections: MIR Methods and Platforms, Harmony, Music Similarity, and Content Based Identification and Retrieval. Glossary of basic terms is given at the end of the book, to familiarize readers with vocabulary referring to music information retrieval.

Content-based multimedia retrieval is a challenging research field with many unsolved problems. This monograph details concepts and algorithms for robust and efficient information retrieval of two different types of multimedia data: waveform-based music data and human motion data. It first examines several approaches in music information retrieval, in particular general strategies as well as efficient algorithms. The book then introduces a general and unified framework for motion analysis, retrieval, and classification, highlighting the design of suitable features, the notion of similarity used to compare data streams, and data organization.

Music Accessing and Retrieval is the first comprehensive survey of the vast new field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). It describes a number of issues which are peculiar to the language of music - including forms, formats, and dimensions of music - together with the typologies of users and their information needs. To fulfil these needs a number of approaches are discussed, from direct search to information filtering and clustering of music documents. The emphasis is on tools, techniques, and approaches for content-based MIR, rather than on the systems that implement them. The interested reader can, however, find descriptions of more than 35 systems for music retrieval with links to their Web sites. Music Accessing and Retrieval can be used as both a guide for beginners who are embarking on research in this relatively new area, and a useful reference for established researchers in this field.

The annual colloquium on information retrieval research provides an opportunity for both new and established researchers to present papers describing work in progress or ?nal results. This colloquium was established by the BCS IRSG(B- tish Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group), and named the Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. Recently, the location of the colloquium has alternated between the United Kingdom and continental Europe. To re?ect the growing European orientation of the event, the colloquium was renamed “European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research” from 2001. Since the inception of the colloquium in 1979 the event has been hosted in the city of Glasgow on four separate occasions. However, this was the ?rst time that the organization of the colloquium had been jointly undertaken by three separate computer and information science departments; an indication of the collaborative nature and diversity of IR research within the universities of the West of Scotland. The organizers of ECIR 2002 saw a sharp increase in the number of go- quality submissions in answer to the call for papers over previous years and as such 52 submitted papers were each allocated 3 members of the program committee for double blind review of the manuscripts. A total of 23 papers were eventually selected for oral presentation at the colloquium in Glasgow which gave an acceptance rate of less than 45% and ensured a very high standard of the papers presented.

This textbook provides both profound technological knowledge and a comprehensive treatment of essential topics in music processing and music information retrieval. Including numerous examples, figures, and exercises, this book is suited for students, lecturers, and researchers working in audio engineering, computer science, multimedia, and musicology. The book consists of eight chapters. The first two cover foundations of music representations and the Fourier transform—concepts that are then used throughout the book. In the subsequent chapters, concrete music processing tasks serve as a starting point. Each of these chapters is organized in a similar fashion and starts with a general description of the music processing scenario at hand before integrating it into a wider context. It then discusses—in a mathematically rigorous way—important techniques and algorithms that are generally applicable to a wide range of analysis, classification, and retrieval problems. At the same time, the techniques are directly applied to a specific music processing task. By mixing theory and practice, the book’s goal is to offer detailed technological insights as well as a deep understanding of music processing applications. Each chapter ends with a section that includes links to the research literature, suggestions for further reading, a list of references, and exercises. The chapters are organized in a modular fashion, thus offering lecturers and readers many ways to choose, rearrange or supplement the material. Accordingly, selected chapters or individual sections can easily be integrated into courses on general multimedia, information science, signal processing, music informatics, or the digital humanities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2007, held in Rome, Italy in April 2007. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and design, efficiency, peer-to-peer networks, result merging, queries, relevance feedback, evaluation, classification and clustering, filtering, topic identification, expert finding, XML IR, Web IR, and multimedia IR.