• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.507-520
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• 2003

In this paper, an automatic construction method of theme melody index for large music database and an associative content-based music retrieval mechanism in which the constructed theme melody index is mainly used to improve the users' response time are proposed. First, the system automatically extracted the theme melody from a music file by the graphical clustering algorithm based on the similarities between motifs of the music. To place an extracted theme melody into the metric space of M-tree, we chose the average length variation and the average pitch variation of the theme melody as the major features. Moreover, we added the pitch signature and length signature which summarize the pitch variation pattern and the length variation pattern of a theme melody, respectively, to increase the precision of retrieval results. We also proposed the associative content-based music retrieval mechanism in which the k-nearest neighborhood searching and the range searching algorithms of M-tree are used to select the similar melodies to user's query melody from the theme melody index. To improve the users' satisfaction, the proposed retrieval mechanism includes ranking and user's relevance feedback functions. Also, we implemented the proposed mechanisms as the essential components of content-based music retrieval systems to verify the usefulness.