A tool for content based navigation of music

The use of pitch contours is an established technique for content-based retrieval of music ('query by humming'). This paper presents a system which employs pitch contours to support content-based navigation around a body of multimedia documents including MIDI and digital audio files. The system adopts an open hypermedia model, enabling the user to find available hypermedia links from an arbitrary fragment in a piece of music, based on the content or location of that fragment. The design of the tools, contour database and the contour-matching algorithms are discussed.