Overview

The increasing availability of digital music accessible by end users is boosting the development of a research area, called Music Information Retrieval (MIR), which is devoted to the study of methodologies for automatic music access. Although MIR usually focuses on content-based approaches, music search facilities in commercial systems are still based on simple keyword matching between music tags, with additional exploitation of user profiling and collaborative filtering approaches.

MusicCLEF aims at promoting the development of novel methodologies for music access and retrieval, integrating content-based information, automatically extracted from music files, with contextual information, provided by users through tags, comments, and reviews. The combination of these two sources of information may help solving the actual limitations of both pure context-based (e.g. cold start, new user) and content-based (e.g. music usage, link with other media) approaches.

MusiCLEF 2011 is one of the benchmarking activities of CLEF 2011 (Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, 19 - 22 September 2011, Amsterdam), which is an activity of the PROMISE Network of Excellence.