Exploiting Musical Connections: A Proposal for Support of Work Relationships in a Digital Music Library

Musical works in the Western art music tradition exist in a complex, inter-related web. Works that are derivative or part of another work are common; however, most music information retrieval systems, including traditional library catalogs, don’t use these essential relationships to improve search results or provide information about them to end-users. As part of the NSF-funded Variations2 Digital Music Library project at Indiana University, we have developed a set of functional requirements defining how derivative and whole/part relationships between musical works should be acted upon in search results, and how these results should be displayed. This paper describes recent research into these relationships, provides examples why they are important in Western art music, outlines how Variations2 or any other music information retrieval system could use these relationships in matching user queries, and describes optimal displays of these relationships to end-users.