A query-by-singing technique for retrieving polyphonic objects of popular music

This paper investigates the problem of retrieving popular music by singing. In contrast to the retrieval of MIDI music, which is easy to acquire the main melody by the selection of the symbolic tracks, retrieving polyphonic objects in CD or MP3 format requires to extract the main melody directly from the accompanied singing signals, which proves difficult to handle well simply using the conventional pitch estimation. To reduce the interference of background accompaniments during the main melody extraction, methods are proposed to estimate the underlying sung notes in a music recording by taking into account the characteristic structure of popular song. In addition, to accommodate users' unprofessional or personal singing styles, methods are proposed to handle the inaccuracies of tempo, pause, transposition, or off-key, etc., inevitably existing in queries. The proposed system has been evaluated on a music database consisting of 2613 phrases extracted manually from 100 Mandarin pop songs. The experimental results indicate the feasibility of retrieving pop songs by singing.