Real-time Accompaniment Using Lyrics-Matching QBH

Query-by-Humming (QBH) is an increasingly popular technology that allows users to browse through a song database by singing/humming a part of the song they wish to retrieve. Besides these cases, QBH can be also used in applications such as Score Alignment and Real-Time Accompaniment, to locate the exact position of the soloist within the piece. We propose a system that initially pinpoints a singer’s location within a song using a multi-similarity QBH approach, and then aligns an existing audio recording of the accompaniment by modifying its tempo and dynamics in real time. Preliminary results for our QBH algorithm show that our approach can achieve 58.5% Top1 accuracy in locating the phrase that contains the exact lyrics – an improvement of 170% over the basic pitch contour method.