To display sound data and a temporal position of part of the sound data coincident with or similar to a given key sound by detecting data including part coincident with or similar to the key sound from a plurality of the sound data.

A frequency of a key sound xk(t) is analyzed. A sound similarity distance dj(a) is calculated while deviating sound data in a temporal direction on the basis of the result of analysis and a result of frequency analysis of j-th data xj(t). A minimum value of the distance dj(a) is used for a sound similarity distance dj of the data xj(t) with respect to the key sound xk(t) and a time a min, when the distance dj(a) is equal to dj, is stored together with information identifying the data. The processing above is applied to all data stored in a database. The stored data are sorted in the ascending order of the similarity distance. The sorted data up to the high-order N-th data are displayed as a retrieval result. Fourier transform is employed for frequency analysis.