Overview of the OMRAS Project: Online Music Retrieval and Searching

Until recently, most research on music information retrieval concentrated on monophonic music. Online Music Retrieval and Searching (OMRAS) is a threeyear project funded under the auspices of the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)/NSF (National Science Foundation) International Digital Library Initiative which began in 1999 and whose remit was to investigate the issues surrounding polyphonic music information retrieval. Here we outline the work OMRAS has achieved in pattern matching, document retrieval, and audio transcription, as well as some prototype work in how to implement these techniques into library systems.