In this contribution, we consider a cross-modal retrieval scenario of Western classical music. Given a short monophonic musical theme in symbolic notation as query, the objective is to find relevant audio recordings in a database. A major challenge of this retrieval task is the possible difference in the degree of polyphony between the monophonic query and the music recordings. Previous studies for popular music addressed this issue by performing the cross-modal comparison based on predominant melodies extracted from the recordings. For Western classical music, however, this approach is problematic since the underlying assumption of a single predominant melody is often violated. Instead of extracting the melody explicitly, another strategy is to perform the cross-modal comparison directly on the basis of melody-enhanced salience representations. As our main contribution, we evaluate several conceptually different salience representations for our cross-modal retrieval scenario. Our extensive experimental results, which have been made available on a website, comprise more than 2000 musical themes and 100 hours of audio recordings.

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8683609