The Europeana Sounds Music Information Retrieval Pilot

This paper describes the realization of a Music Information Retrieval (MIR) pilot for a huge audio corpora of European cultural sound heritage, which was developed as part of the Europeana Sounds project. The demonstrator aimed at evaluating the applicability of technologies deriving from the MIR domain to content provided by various European digital libraries and audio archives. To approach this aim, a query-by-example functionality was implemented using audio-content based similarity search. The development was preceded by an elaborated evaluation of the Europeana Sounds collection to assess appropriate combinations of music content descriptors that are capable to effectively discriminate the various types of audio-content provided within the dataset. The MIR-pilot was evaluated both by using an automatic and a user based evaluation. The results showed that the quality of the implemented query-by-example algorithm is comparable to state-of-the-art music similarity approaches reported in literature.