Song Prompter: an Accompaniment System Based on the Automatic Alignment of Lyrics and Chords to Audio

We present Song Prompter, a software system that acts as a performance guide by showing horizontally scrolling lyrics, chords, beats marks and bar marks in a graphical user interface, together with an audio accompaniment consisting of bass and MIDI drums. A song outline displays the song structure, including names and positions of sections for easy overview and navigation. Song Prompter enables users to sing and play live along the timeline of an original song, without having to memorize lyrics and chords or turning pages. Chord labels, and bass and audio playback can be transposed to a different key, and the playback speed can be changed. Unlike existing score following systems (for a review see [1]), karaoke systems, or musical computer games such as Rock Star and Guitar Hero, Song Prompter requires no musical score input, and chords and lyrics need not be manually aligned with the audio. Instead, we use an automatic lyrics-to-audio alignment method [4], which requires only the original audio recording of a song and a text file with lyrics and chords in a format similar to that often found on the internet. The drum and bass accompaniment is also extracted automatically from the original audio recording. Therefore, the music selection is not limited by commercially available transcriptions.