OMRAS is a system for the efficient content-based searching and retrieval of musical information from online databases stored in a variety of formats ranging from encoded scores to digital audio. The system will be easily operated by users with a wide range of musical ability and understanding and will be controlled by a simple-to-use graphical 'musical' interface, both for search queries and for the presentation of results. The musical databases might range from a modest collection of score-files stored on a single hard disk for an individual research project, to the 'collection' of the countless MIDI- or audio-files accessible via the Internet.
OMRASIn briefRetrieving information from multimedia archives in general is hampered by the lack of available tools for searching their specialised content. This project aims to address one area of this problem, that of searching musical databases. The music in the databases might be stored in a variety of formats and comprise any of three basic types of data: a) encoded descriptive score-data (as in the files of a commercial score-notation program); b) listings of prescriptive performance instructions (as in MIDI files); c) sound-files (as in digital audio recordings).
Throughout the duration and scope of OMRAS , the research will keep sight of the needs of the spread of potential users and their diverse levels of musical knowledge and ability, since the perceived arcane nature of musical notation and the various forms of music-encoding languages can be seen as a major disincentive to the kind of investigations and insights that these tools might allow.
A major collaboration between King's College London and the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, OMRAS is funded jointly by the Digital Libraries programmes run by JISC (UK) and NSF (US).