Music Indexing and Retrieval: Current Problems

Academics and librarians have yet to reach a consensus on the indexing of print resources about music, nor have they developed satisfactory means of indexing sheet music. With the increasing presence of audio music on the Internet, the need to properly index MP3s and other audio files has reached a new level of urgency, and with it the need to label these items satisfactorily to enable retrieval. While the importance of these fields has been constant since the beginning of indexing and cataloging, increased availability of sources means that there is more music available to users than ever before, but little in the way of sorting through it. Luckily studies are being undertaken with the aim of solving these problems. This article seeks to explore and explain some of these developments.