The Music Annotation Pattern

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Music Annotation Pattern, an ontology design pattern that standardizes diverse music annotation systems, enabling semantic interoperability and large-scale dataset integration across modalities.

Contribution

It presents the first ontology-based framework to unify music annotations, capturing semantic content at multiple levels and supporting multi-modal, cross-corpora integration.

Findings

Enables interoperability between different music annotation standards.

Supports multi-modal annotations from audio and symbolic sources.

Facilitates large-scale integration of music datasets.

Abstract

The annotation of music content is a complex process to represent due to its inherent multifaceted, subjectivity, and interdisciplinary nature. Numerous systems and conventions for annotating music have been developed as independent standards over the past decades. Little has been done to make them interoperable, which jeopardises cross-corpora studies as it requires users to familiarise with a multitude of conventions. Most of these systems lack the semantic expressiveness needed to represent the complexity of the musical language and cannot model multi-modal annotations originating from audio and symbolic sources. In this article, we introduce the Music Annotation Pattern, an Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) to homogenise different annotation systems and to represent several types of musical objects (e.g. chords, patterns, structures). This ODP preserves the semantics of the object's content at different levels and temporal granularity. Moreover, our ODP accounts for multi-modality upfront, to describe annotations derived from different sources, and it is the first to enable the integration of music datasets at a large scale.