Abstract: Recently the types of information are changed from text based to the various multimedia data such as audio, image, and video. Also, our life is very influenced by various multimedia data due to the spread of the internet. In this state, it is necessary to study about efficient search method for multimedia data. In this paper, a review of literature on content based musical instrument recognition is described. The ever-increasing amount of digital audio media in recent years, led to the demand of content based retrieval of multimedia. There is in fact a growing interest for content based instrument reorganization most of the works are related to musical instrument classification, pitch estimation, music.

Keywords: Pitch estimation, musical instrument recognition systems, and multiple instruments in polyphonic music.