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This lecture gives an introduction to techniques and applications used in Music Information Retrieval. The main topics covered are feature extraction (content- and context-based features), similarity measurement, applications of MIR, data projection and visualization, and user interfaces.

There will be a strong focus on the pratical part of the KV in the summer term 2012. We will perform a small contest as follows. Participating students will form groups and select one type of context-based similarity category (for example, music similarities derived from Web pages, from P2P network traffic or queries, from co-occurrences in user's playlist). Then, different approaches and algorithms to determine music similarity will be re-implemented (according to literature that will largely be provided by the lecturer). The implementations of all groups will be evaluated on a standardized data set (tuning will be allowed), and a winning team will be awarded.