We describe the integration of content based techniques for navigation of musical information (primarily in MIDI representation) into a multiagent system for distributed information management. This exercise illustrates the application of the multiagent approach to engineering distributed multimedia information systems and raises some design issues. Keywords Software agents, content based navigation, pitch contours, collaborative filtering, open hypermedia, query routing. 1. INTRODUCTION The goal of our research activity is to bring music into the distributed multimedia information space that we manage and navigate through the use of hypermedia tools. Music proves to be an excellent example of multimedia data: it exists in a variety formats, some highly structured, it can be transmitted using a store-and-forward or streaming model, it can be synchronized with other media. Hence our investigation addresses more general research issues in the application of software agents to mul...

The use of pitch contours is an established technique for content-based retrieval of music ('query by humming'). This paper presents a system which employs pitch contours to support content-based navigation around a body of multimedia documents including MIDI and digital audio files. The system adopts an open hypermedia model, enabling the user to find available hypermedia links from an arbitrary fragment in a piece of music, based on the content or location of that fragment. The design of the tools, contour database and the contour-matching algorithms are discussed.