The increasing availability of music in digital format needs to be matched by the development of tools for music accessing, filtering, classification, and retrieval. The research area of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) covers many of these aspects. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of this vast and new field. A number of issues, which are peculiar to the music language, are described–including forms, formats, and dimensions of music–together with the typologies of users and their information needs. To fulfil these needs a number of approaches are discussed, from direct search to information filtering and clustering of music documents. An overview of the techniques for music processing, which are commonly exploited in many approaches, is also presented. Evaluation and comparisons of the approaches on a common benchmark are other important issues. To this end, a description of the initial efforts and evaluation campaigns for MIR is provided.

数字格式音乐可用性的提高需要与音乐访问，过滤，分类和检索工具的开发相匹配。音乐信息检索（MIR）的研究领域涵盖了许多这些方面。本文的目的是概述这一广阔而又新的领域。描述了音乐语言特有的许多问题，包括音乐的形式，格式和尺寸，以及用户的类型及其信息需求。为了满足这些需求，讨论了许多方法，从直接搜索到音乐文档的信息过滤和聚类。还介绍了音乐处理技术的概述，这些技术通常在许多方法中得到利用。在一个共同基准上对这些方法进行评估和比较是其他重要问题。为此，提供了有关MIR的初步工作和评估活动的描述。