Music databases need automatic high-level content querying beyond raw audio signals.

Evidence

For example, if only audio signals are available, it is not possible to make the request ‘I want to hear some sturdy bebop with no trumpet, a female vocalist singing in French, and with electric guitar’. A musically trained listener may be able to pick out such tracks using his or her memory and by listening to available tracks. A computer-based solution would be appealing, since such a task could potentially be automated and computers are much faster at such tasks than humans. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2577

Categorization

• SEED: The concrete query example could anchor an essay on the gap between signal-level storage and semantic-level search in media libraries.
• QUESTION: Two decades later, how close are music streaming services to answering such natural-language queries? Worth investigating current state.