Retrieving audio recordings using musical themes

In 1948, Barlow and Morgenstern released a collection of about 10,000 themes of well-known instrumental pieces from the corpus of Western Classical music [1]. These monophonic themes (usually four bars long) are often the most memorable parts of a piece of music. In this paper, we report on a systematic study considering a cross-modal retrieval scenario. Using a musical theme as a query, the objective is to identify all related music recordings from a given audio collection. By adapting well-known retrieval techniques, our main goal is to get a better understanding of the various challenges including tempo deviations, musical tunings, key transpositions, and differences in the degree of polyphony between the symbolic query and the audio recordings to be retrieved. In particular, we present an oracle fusion approach that indicates upper performance limits achievable by a combination of current retrieval techniques.