1 Tonal MIR: A Music Retrieval Engine Based on Semantic Web Technologies1

Abstract. Within the Music Information Retrieval context, this paper describes an innovative approach to discovering music similarities. The Tonal MIR system has been designed and developed to provide a powerful and flexible music retrieval mechanism using semantic web technologies. The retrieval process is based on an algorithm consisting of two main phases: the preprocessing, that converts an audio file into an XML/RDF normalized form; the matching phase, based on inference rules, that compares the normalized music excerpt with the music items stored in a database, and produces as output a list of results ranked according to a similarity degree