Harmonic models for polyphonic music retrieval Jeremy Pickens and Tim Crawford   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Music information retrieval Abstract Most work in the ad hoc music retrieval field has focused on the retrieval of monophonic documents using monophonic queries. Polyphony adds considerably more complexity. We present a method by which polyphonic music documents may be retrieved by polyphonic music queries. A new harmonic description technique is given, wherein the information from all chords, rather than the most significant chord, is used. This description is then combined in a new and unique way with Markov statistical methods to create models of both documents and queries. Document models are compared to query models and then ranked by score. Though test collections for music are currently scarce, we give the first known recall-precision graphs for polyphonic music retrieval, and results are favorable. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery