The World Wide Web contains a vast and ever-growing collection of music audio files representing nearly every musical style, ensemble, genre, country, culture, and time period. However, with the exception of the information conveyed in the title, the contents of such audio files can only be understood by listening to the files. Thus searches of audio files analogous to those performed by text-based search engines are currently impossible. In this project the PI will study and implement solutions to the "Signal to Score" problem in which an audio file is transcribed into a format capturing information similar to that contained in a printed musical score. The PI's approach splits the task into two components: "Signal to Piano Roll" in which the musical signal is transcribed into a MIDI-like representation, and "Rhythmic Parsing" in which the piano roll representation is further transcribed into a musical score or equivalent representation. The goal is to allow the generation of searchable data bases that contain high level music descriptions, which could be used to algorithmically answer questions on musical content such as "Is the audio file likely to be a blues song?" or "What is the time signature of the music?"
