Music Retrieval and Recommendation: A Tutorial Overview

In this tutorial, we give an introduction to the field of and state of the art in music information retrieval (MIR). The tutorial particularly spotlights the question of music similarity, which is an essential aspect in music retrieval and recommendation. Three factors play a central role in MIR research: (1) the music content, i.e., the audio signal itself, (2) the music context, i.e., metadata in the widest sense, and (3) the listeners and their contexts, manifested in user-music interaction traces. We review approaches that extract features from all three data sources and combinations thereof and show how these features can be used for (large-scale) music indexing, music description, music similarity measurement, and recommendation. These methods are further showcased in a number of popular music applications, such as automatic playlist generation and personalized radio stationing, location-aware music recommendation, music search engines, and intelligent browsing interfaces. Additionally, related topics such as music identification, automatic music accompaniment and score following, and search and retrieval in the music production domain are discussed.