Relating Natural Language Text to Musical Passages

There is a vast body of musicological literature containing detailed analyses of musical works. These texts make frequent references to musical passages in scores by means of natural language phrases. Our long- term aim is to investigate whether these phrases can be linked automatically to the musical passages to which they refer. As a first step, we have organised for two years running a shared evaluation in which participants must develop software to identify passages in a MusicXML score based on a short noun phrase in English. In this paper, we present the rationale for this work, discuss the kind of references to musical passages which can occur in actual scholarly texts, describe the first two years of the evaluation and finally appraise the results to establish what progress we have made.