Super-convenience for Non-musicians: Querying MP3 and the Semantic Web Super-convenience for Non-musicians: Querying MP3 and the Semantic Web

Electronic music distribution, the internet success of MP3 and the actual activities concerning the semantic web of music require for convenient music information retrieval, resp. question-answering systems. In this paper we will give an overview about the concepts behind our “super-convenience” approach for MIR. By using natural language as input for human-oriented queries to large-scale music collections we were able to address the needs of non-musicians. The entire system is applicable for future semantic web services, existing music web-sites and future electronic devices such as cd-chargers for cars, or PDAs. It is a full-fledged architecture combining state-of-the-art approaches from different research disciplines. We customized in a cross-discipline approach techniques from natural language understanding phonetic matching, automatic analysis of audio for meta tag construction, content-based classification and music ontologies as a backbone for the representation of musical knowledge. Beside the basic framework we present a novel idea to incorporate the processing of lyrics based on standard information retrieval methods, i.e the vector space model. This work has been performed at the German Research Center for AI and the authors spin-off company – sonicson -, specialized in music web services.