CISUC

A Methodology for Detection of Melody in Polyphonic Musical Signals

Authors

Rui Pedro Paiva
Teresa Mendes
F. Amilcar Cardoso

Abstract

QBH in polyphonic music signals requires a melody representation of the songs in the database. This is a complex problem for which there is no general and accurate solution yet.
In this paper, we present a bottom-up method for melody detection in polyphonic musical signals. Our approach is based on the assumption that the melodic line is often salient in terms of note intensity (energy). First, trajectories of the most intense harmonic groups are constructed. Then, note candidates are obtained by trajectory segmentation (in terms of frequency and energy variations). Too short, low-energy and octave-related notes are then eliminated. Finally, the melody is extracted by selecting the most important notes at each time, based on energy criteria.
We tested our method with excerpts from 12 songs encompassing several genres. In the songs where the sole stands out clearly, most of melody notes were successfully extracted. However, for songs where the melody is not that salient, the results are poor. Nevertheless, we could say that the results are encouraging.

Keywords

melody extraction, query-by-humming, music information retrieval

Subject

Music Information Retrieval

Conference

AES116, May 2004

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Cited by

Year 2012 : 1 citations

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Year 2011 : 2 citations

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Year 2010 : 2 citations

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Year 2007 : 2 citations

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Year 2006 : 8 citations

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Year 2005 : 3 citations

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