The Problems and Opportunities of Content-based Analysis and Description of Ethnic Music

Abstract

The Belgian Royal Museum for Central-Africa (RMCA)holds a large collection of ethnographic artifacts, includinga sound archive with music recordings from the early 20thCentury up to recently. The archive is one of the biggestand best-documented archives worldwide for the region ofCentral Africa. An on-going digitisation project is part of astrategy to conserve this archive and make it accessible tothe public by (i) the digitisation of the data, and (ii) theapplication of music information retrieval techniques forthe digitised data. While state-of-the-art research in musicinformation retrieval aims to search and retrieve music onthe basis of content description, most of the existing toolsare designed for Western music collections, without anyguarantee that these techniques can be applied to musicfrom other cultures. African music, in particular, createsnew challenges for content-based description andinformation retrieval. This paper describes some generalproblems regarding the content-based description ofAfrican and other non-Western music. It suggests anapproach for describing pitch structures which will allowfor the description of both Western music and non-Westernmusic.