A Niche?
The second way is to have a piano keyboard, either real or virtual, and ‘play’ in a query using music notation. Typically, this is then converted to a text-based representation (XML or other), and used as a query against a database.
Regardless of the input mechanism, I have yet to find a paper to answer a simple question: When musicians & musicologists are searching for notated music, how do they do it? What tools do they use? To date there has been very little work on figuring out what musicians, theorists & musicologists do when they are looking for music.
So, we don’t know if the text-representation-based input is usable or ‘intuitive’ to musicians (I suspect it isn’t); or if a piano keyboard really is an effective way of searching (I’m not sure that it is).
To draw some wild guesses, here is how I think they search for music:
- By composer: For musicologists & theorists, searching by composer is a natural way of ‘berrypicking’ their way through the music search space. They can pick a composer, find something interesting, and then broaden out to other pieces by that composer to see if this interesting thing is a signature of his or her work.
- By time period: Musical styles are beholden to the time they were written. Searching for a particular musical idiom can start by figuring out when it occurs, and then move forwards and backwards in time to figure out its impact in a larger context.
- By geographic region: This can include nations—France, Germany, Italy, etc.—but it can also include “Schools of Thought”: Composers gathered in a certain area that compose in a like manner. Les Six or The Mighy Handful are examples.
- Print references: Treaties or other writings on music often bring together pieces that have common thematic or motivic elements.
Those are just a few off the top of my head. There are probably more, if only someone would sit down with day-to-day searchers of music and find these things out!