Flexible music retrieval in sublinear time

Music sequences can be treated as texts in order to perform music retrieval tasks on them. However, the text search problems that result from this modeling are unique to music retrieval. Up to date, several approaches derived from classical string matching have been proposed to cope with the new search problems, yet each problem had its own algorithms. In this paper we show that a technique recently developed for multipattern approximate string matching is flexible enough to be successfully extended to solve many different music retrieval problems, as well as combinations thereof not addressed before. We show that the resulting algorithms are average-optimal in many cases and close to average-optimal otherwise. Empirically, they are much better than existing approaches in many practical cases.