Method and apparatus for classifying a musical piece containing plural notes

Abstract

The present invention is directed to classifying a musical piece based on determined characteristics for each of plural notes contained within the piece. Exemplary embodiments accommodate the fact that in a continuous piece of music, the starting and ending points of a note may overlap previous notes, the next note, or notes played in parallel by one or more instruments. This is complicated by the additional fact that different instruments produce notes with dramatically different characteristics. For example, notes with a sustaining stage, such as those produced by a trumpet or flute, possess high energy in the middle of the sustaining stage, while notes without a sustaining stage, such as those produced by a piano or guitar, posses high energy in the attacking stage when the note is first produced. Exemplary embodiments address these complexities to permit the indexing and retrieval of musical pieces in real time, in a database, thus simplifying database management and enhancing the ability to search multimedia assets contained in the database.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.