Donald Byrd

Sorting out searching: a user-interface framework for text searches

Current user interfaces for textual database searching leave much to be desired: individually, they are often confusing, and as a group, they are seriously inconsistent. We propose a four-phase framework for user-interface design. The framework provides common structure and terminology for searching while preserving the distinct features of individual collections and search mechanisms.

Problems of music information retrieval in the real world

Although a substantial number of research projects have addressed music information retrieval over the past three decades, the field is still very immature. Few of these projects involve complex (polyphonic) music; methods for evaluation are at a very primitive stage of development; none of the projects tackles the problem of realistically large-scale databases. Many problems to be faced are due to the nature of music itself. Among these are issues in human perception and cognition of music, especially as they concern the recognizability of a musical phrase. This paper considers some of the most fundamental problems in music information retrieval, challenging the common assumption that searching on pitch (or pitch-contour) alone is likely to be satisfactory for all purposes. This assumption may indeed be true for most monophonic (single-voice) music, but it is certainly inadequate for polyphonic (multi-voice) music. Even in the monophonic case it can lead to misleading results. The fact, long recognized in projects involving monophonic music, that a recognizable passage is usually not identical with the search pattern means that approximate matching is almost always necessary, yet this too is severely complicated by the demands of polyphonic music. Almost all text-IR methods rely on identifying approximate units of meaning, that is, words. A fundamental problem in music IR is that locating such units is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible.

A scrollbar-based visualization for document navigation

We are interested in questions of improving user control in bestmatch text-retrieval systems, specifically questions as to whether simple visualizations that nonetheless go b eyond the minimal ones generally available can significantly help users. Recently, we have been investigating ways to help users decide—given a set of documents retrieved by a query—which documents and p assages are worth closer examination. We built a document viewer incorporating a visualization centered around a novel content-displaying scrollbar and color term highlighting, and studied whether the visualization is helpful to non-expert searchers. Participants’ reaction to the visualization was very positive, while the objective results were inconclusive.

Polyphonic Score Retrieval Using Polyphonic Audio Queries: A Harmonic Modeling Approach

This paper extends the familiar “query by humming” music retrieval framework into the polyphonic realm. As humming in multiple voices is quite difficult, the task is more accurately described as “query by audio example,” onto a collection of scores. To our knowledge, we are the first to use polyphonic audio queries to retrieve from polyphonic symbolic collections. Furthermore, as our results will show, we will not only use an audio query to retrieve a known item symbolic piece, but we will use it to retrieve an entire set of real-world composed variations on that piece, also in the symbolic format. The harmonic modeling approach which forms the basis of this work is a new and valuable technique which has both wide applicability and future potential.

Variations2: retrieving and using music in an academic setting

University music students, teachers, and researchers discover and retrieve musical works and navigate within them, then create annotations and share them with other users.

Evaluating combinations of ranked lists and visualizations of inter-document similarity

We are interested in how ideas from document clustering can be used to improve the retrieval accuracy of ranked lists in interactive systems. In particular, we are interested in ways to evaluate the effectiveness of such systems to decide how they might best be constructed. In this study, we construct and evaluate systems that present the user with ranked lists and a visualization of inter-document similarities. We first carry out a user study to evaluate the clustering/ranked list combination on instance-oriented retrieval, the task of the TREC-6 Interactive Track. We find that although users generally prefer the combination, they are not able to use it to improve effectiveness. In the second half of this study, we develop and evaluate an approach that more directly combines the ranked list with information from inter-document similarities. Using the TREC collections and relevance judgments, we show that it is possible to realize substantial improvements in effectiveness by doing so, and that although users can use the combined information effectively, the system can provide hints that substantially improve on the users solo effort. The resulting approach shares much in common with an interactive application of incremental relevance feedback. Throughout this study, we illustrate our work using two prototype systems constructed for these evaluations. The first, AspInQuery, is a classic information retrieval system augmented with a specialized tool for recording information about instances of relevance. The other system, Lighthouse, is a Web-based application that combines a ranked list with a portrayal of inter-document similarity. Lighthouse can work with collections such as TREC, as well as the results of Web search engines.

Music-notation searching and digital libraries

Almost all work on music information retrieval to date has concentrate d on music in the audio and event (normally MIDI) domains. However, music in the form of notation, especially Conventional Music Notation (CMN), is of much interest to musically-trained persons, both amateurs and professionals, and searching CMN has great value for digital music libraries. One obvious reason little has been done on music retrieval in CMN form is the overwhelming complexity of CMN, which requires a very substantial investment in programming before one can even begin studying music IR. This paper reports on work adding music-retrieval capabilities to Nightingale©, an existing professional-level music-notation editor.

Towards a Standard Testbed for Optical Music Recognition: Definitions, Metrics, and Page Images

We posit that progress in Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has been held up for years by the absence of anything resembling the standard testbeds in use in other fields that face difficult evaluation problems. One example of such a field is text information retrieval (IR), where the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) has annually-renewed IR tasks with accompanying data sets. In music informatics, the Music Information Retrieval Exchange (MIREX), with its annual tests and meetings held during the ISMIR conference, is a close analog to TREC; but MIREX has never had an OMR track or a collection of music such a track could employ. We describe why the absence of an OMR testbed is a problem and how this problem may be mitigated. To aid in the establishment of a standard testbed, we provide (1) a set of definitions for the complexity of music notation; (2) a set of performance metrics for OMR tools that gauge score complexity and graphical quality; and (3) a small corpus of music for use as a baseline for a proper ...

Music representation in a digital music library

The Variations2 digital music library currently supports music in audio and score-image formats. In a future version, we plan to add music in a symbolic form. We describe our work defining a music representation suitable for the needs of our users.

Music retrieval algorithms for the lead sheet problem

Abstract Methods from string and pattern matching have recently been applied to many problems in music retrieval. We consider the so-called lead sheet problem, where symbolic representations of the harmony, melody, and, usually, bass line are presented separately. This is a common situation in some forms of popular music but is also significant for ‘classical’ music in many cases. A number of different but related musical situations are analysed and efficient algorithms are presented for music retrieval in each one.