DAFx-2011 - Paris

In this paper we evaluate some of the alternative methods commonly applied in the first stages of the signal processing chain of automatic melody extraction systems. Namely, the first two stages are studied – the extraction of sinusoidal components and the computation of a time-pitch salience function, with the goal of determining the benefits and caveats of each approach under the specific context of predominant melody estimation. The approaches are evaluated on a data-set of polyphonic music containing several musical genres with different singing/playing styles, using metrics specifically designed for measuring the usefulness of each step for melody extraction. The results suggest that equal loudness filtering and frequency/amplitude correction methods provide significant improvements, whilst using a multi-resolution spectral transform results in only a marginal improvement compared to the standard STFT. The effect of key parameters in the computation of the salience function is also studied and discussed.

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