Towards a Content-based Music Search Engine

Large collections of multimedia documents need to be provided with new tools for easy access and retrieval. In this paper we present a prototype system, available through a Web interface, that can identify an unknown recording of classical music using a database of reference recordings. An important characteristic is that the identification can be carried out also when the query is the recording of a different performance of the work stored in the database, possibly played by different instruments and recorded with background noise.