Search Effectiveness Measures for Symbolic Music Queries in Very Large Databases

In the interest of establishing robust benchmarks for search efficiency, we conducted a series of tests on symbolic databases of musical incipits and themes taken from several diverse kinds of repertories. The results we report differ from existing studies in four respects: (1) the data quantity is much larger (c. 100,000 entries in all); (2) the levels of melodic precision are more refined; (3) anchored and unanchored searches were differentiated; and (4) results from combination pitchand-rhythm searches were compared with those for pitch-only searches.