Abstract
Querying polyphonic music from a large data collection is an interesting and challenging topic. Recently, researchers attempt to provide efficient techniques for content-based retrieval in polyphonic music databases where queries can also be polyphonic. However, most of the techniques do not perform the approximate matching well. In this paper, we present a novel method to efficiently retrieve k music works that contain segments most similar to the user query based on the edit distance. A list-based index structure is first constructed using the feature of the polyphony. A set of candidate approximate answers is then generated for the user query. A lower bounding mechanism is proposed to prune these candidates such that the k answers can be obtained efficiently. The efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated by real data set and synthetic data set, reporting significant improvement over existing approaches in the response time yielded.