Music Information Retrieval Research

There is a long history of music librarianship in the domain of printed Western classical music. Special schemes have been developed to aid in the organisation and retrieval of musical works, and existing schemes have been widely used to include these types of documents in larger physical library collections. However the advent of digital consumer technology in the form of MP3 players and mobile phones, combined with the enormous impact of the internet and the digitisation and ease of compression of audio files has brought new formats and types of user interaction to the fore. This has led to an explosion in music information retrieval research, concentrating on how to most beneficially use computers to organise, search, and retrieve music information and recordings from large digital collections.