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Impression-based music retrieval helps users to find musical pieces that suit their preferences, feelings, or mental states from among a huge volume of a music database. Users are asked to select one or more pairs of impression words from among multiple pairs that are presented by the system and to estimate each selected pair on a seven-step scale to input their impressions into the system. For instance, if they want to locate musical pieces that will create a happy impression, they should check the radio button ‘‘Happy’’ in the impression scale: Very happy–Happy–A little happy–Neutral–A little sad–Sad–Very sad. A pair of impression words with a seven-step scale is called an impression scale in this paper. The system calculates the distance between the impressions of each musical piece in a user-specified music database and the impressions that are input by the user. Subsequently, it selects candidate musical pieces to be presented as retrieval results. The impressions of musical pieces are expressed numerically by vectors that are generated from a musical piece’s pitch, strength, and length of every tone using n-gram statistics.

A method for analysis of rhythmic interpretation of a characteristic rythmic pattern in polonaise is presented. The pattern concerned is one 8th note followed by two 16th notes. By physical measurement of timing for this pattern as it appeared in the first beat in several performances of Chopin’s polonaise (Grande Polonaise Op. 22), the duration of this pattern was generally found to be lengthened considerably. Further, a listening experiment showed that this portion had a rhythmic stress (of lengthening accent). To characterize the expressive timing of the pattern, a pair of ratios, P=[a,b] with a=x:1 and b=1:y, was introduced, where a denotes the ratio of durations of the 8th note to the sum of two 16th notes, and b the ratio of the two 16th notes. TheP’s from the performances by six pianists were plotted in the x-y plane. The result revealed a clear distinction among individual rhythmic interpretations of the six pianists, e.g., x<1 and y≳1 for the P’s of three pianists, which implies that they put a stress on the second 16th note.