Singing Transcription from Polyphonic Music Using Melody Contour Filtering

Abstract

Automatic singing transcription and analysis from polyphonic music records are essential in a number of indexing techniques for computational auditory scenes. To obtain a note-level sequence in this work, we divide the singing transcription task into two subtasks: melody extraction and note transcription. We construct a salience function in terms of harmonic and rhythmic similarity and a measurement of spectral balance. Central to our proposed method is the measurement of melody contours, which are calculated using edge searching based on their continuity properties. We calculate the mean contour salience by separating melody analysis from the adjacent breakpoint connective strength matrix, and we select the final melody contour to determine MIDI notes. This unique method, combining audio signals with image edge analysis, provides a more interpretable analysis platform for continuous singing signals. Experimental analysis using Music Information Retrieval Evaluation Exchange (MIREX) datasets shows that our technique achieves promising results both for audio melody extraction and polyphonic singing transcription.

Keywords

• singing transcription
• audio signal analysis
• melody contour
• audio melody extraction
• music information retrieval