Bridging the Music Semantic Gap

Abstract. In this paper we present the music information plane and the different levels of information extraction that exist in the musical domain. Based on this approach we propose a way to overcome the existing semantic gap in the music field. Our approximation is twofold: we propose a set of music descriptors that can automatically be extracted from the audio signals, and a top-down approach that adds explicit and formal semantics to these annotations. These music descriptors are generated in two ways: as derivations and combinations of lower-level descriptors and as generalizations induced from manually annotated databases by the intensive application of machine learning. We belive that merging both approaches (bottom-up and top-down) can overcome the existing semantic gap in the musical domain.