The Cuidado music browser: an end-to-end electronic music distribution system

The IST project Cuidado, which ran from January 2001 to December 2003, produced the first entirely automatic chain for extracting and exploiting musical metadata for browsing music. The Sony CSL laboratory is primarily interested in the context of popular music browsing in large-scale catalogues. First, we are interested in human-centred issues related to browsing "Popular Music." Popular here means that the music accessed to is widely distributed, and known to many listeners. Second, we consider "popular browsing" of music, i.e., making music accessible to non-specialists (music lovers), and allowing sharing of musical tastes and information within communities, departing from the usual, single user view of digital libraries. This research project covers all areas of the music-to-listener chain, from music description-descriptor extraction from the music signal, or data mining techniques-similarity based access and novel music retrieval methods such as automatic sequence generation, and user interface issues. This paper describes the scientific and technical issues at stake, and the results obtained.