A practical query-by-humming system for a large music database

Abstract

A music retrieval system that accepts hummed tunes as queries is described in this paper. This system uses similaxity retrieval because a hummed tune may contain errors. The retrieval result is a list of song names ranked according to the closeness of the match. Our ultimate goal is that the correct song should be first on the list. This means that eventually our system's similarity retrieval should allow for only one correct answer.The most significant improvement our system has over general query-by-humming systems is that all processing of musical information is done based on beats instead of notes. This type of query processing is robust against queries generated from erroneous input. In addition, acoustic information is transcribed and converted into relative intervals and is used for making feature vectors. This increases the resolution of the retrieval system compared with other general systems, which use only pitch direction information.The database currently holds over 10,000 songs, and the retrieval time is at most one second. This level of performance is mainly achieved through the use of indices for retrieval. In this paper, we also report on the results of music analyses of the songs in the database. Based on these results, new technologies for improving retrieval accuracy, such as partial feature vectors and or'ed retrieval among multiple search keys, axe proposed. The effectiveness of these technologies is evaluated quantitatively, and it is found that the retrieval accuracy increases by more than 20% compared with the previous system [9]. Practical user interfaces for the system axe also described.

A SOM-based multimodal system for musical query-by-content

“…Values for τ (q) range from 0 (a correct match) to |T | − 1, where T is the set of target songs. The percentage of targets occurring as the first result are computed using [2]. These metrics are commonly used because, considering the difficulty of the task, requiring the user to listen to five or ten possible matches is not unreasonable when searching through a database of possibly thousands of songs.…”

“…In fact, the system is heavily dependent on this distance function. Many current systems first transcribe the audio content to a text representation and then use common string-matching techniques as the distance function [2], [3], [4]. This process, however, is problematic because it reduces the content-rich music to a simple text string.…”

Personalization in Multimodal Music Retrieval

“…Another category of query by example retrieval applications is query by humming systems [13,30,49], where the search input consists of a user's recorded voice.…”

Similarity matching of continuous melody contours for humming querying of melody databases

“…Kosugi et al [8,9] have proposed a beat-based approach for query-by-humming. This method is robust against pitch variations in humming melodies.…”