Music websites are ubiquitous .... As the amount of musical content increases ... we expect ... rising demand for music search services. ... [S]earch engines [that] rely on file names, song title, composer or performer ... do not make use of the musical content.

... a more natural, effective, and usable music-information retrieval (MIR) system should have audio input ... where the user can query with musical content. With MusArt, a system for audio-input MIR, a user sings or plays a theme, hook, or riff from the desired piece of music. The system transcribes the query and searches for related themes in a database, returning the most similar themes ...