Wei Chai

Melody retrieval on the web

This paper explores issues involved in a web-based query-by-humming system, which can find a piece of music in the digital music repository based on hummed melodies. Melody representation, melody matching, melody extraction and query construction are critical for an efficient and robust query-by-humming system and thus the focuses of this paper. Compared to previous systems, a new and more effective melody representation and corresponding melody matching methods which combined both pitch and rhythmic information were adopted, a whole set of tools and deliverable software were implemented, and experiments were conducted to evaluate the system. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods are more effective for most users than other existing methods.