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.

翻译：音乐内容的标注是一个复杂的表征过程，因其固有的多面性、主观性和跨学科性质而具有挑战性。过去数十年间，众多独立的音乐标注系统与规范不断涌现，但鲜有研究致力于实现它们之间的互操作性。这导致跨语料库研究面临障碍，用户需熟悉大量不同的标注约定。现有系统大多缺乏表征音乐语言复杂性的语义表达能力，也无法对源自音频和符号来源的多模态标注进行建模。本文提出了一种名为“音乐标注模式”的本体设计模式（ODP），旨在统一不同标注系统，并表征多种音乐对象（例如和弦、模式、结构）。该ODP能够在不同层面和时间粒度上保留对象内容的语义。此外，我们的ODP从一开始就考虑多模态特性，可描述源自不同来源的标注，并且是首个能够实现大规模音乐数据集集成的ODP。