Factors affecting music retrieval in query-by-melody

This paper assesses the impact of three factors on the music retrieval accuracy of a query-by-melody (QBM) system. The investigated factors are the accuracy of the query provider (the singer), the query transcription accuracy of the acoustic front-end and the length of the query. The music retrieval accuracy is described in terms of a new concept, called the remaining information fraction (RIF). With this new concept it is possible to get more insight in the way the individual factors affect the music retrieval accuracy. The experimental results reported in this paper support the following conclusions: i) the music retrieval accuracy of a QBM system, as assessed on a large set of queries, is strongly correlated with the query transcription accuracy of its front-end, as assessed on a small set of manually transcribed queries, ii) there is still a significant gap between the accuracies obtained with manual and automatically generated query transcriptions, and iii) the music retrieval accuracy starts to drop quickly as soon as the query consists of less than 20 notes.