Most people have experienced the frustration of having a tune in their head, but not knowing what it is. How do you find the name of a song, if you only know the tune?
Historically, there have been many tools available to allow experts to search for music, such as books classifying music by the differences in pitches of notes. But as the internet grows, and more music databases are available for non-expert users, we also need new ways to search for music.
One solution has been to have the user to hum or sing a song into a microphone, but these require a pretty good ability to sing in key. So, as a result, several systems have been developed which allow the searching of music databases by tapping out rhythms, something that should be relatively easy for people to do.
This tutorial is a look at the rhythm matching methods used in BeatBank [1][2]. This system uses a simplified representation of rhythm to search music databases.
A tutorial written for COMP-644, Pattern Recognition, by
John Harrison
Centre for Intelligent Machines
McGill University