Transcription of the Singing Melody in Polyphonic Music (MIREX 2006)

We introduce a method for theMIREX 2006 “AudioMelody Extraction” task in which the goal is to estimate fundamental frequency (F0) trajectory of the main melody within polyphonic music. The introduced method is based on multipleF0 estimation followed by acoustic and musicological modeling. The acoustic model consists of separate models for melody notes and for no-melody segments. The musicological model uses key estimation and note bigrams to determine the transition probabilities between notes. Viterbi decoding produces a sequence of notes and rests as a transcription of the melody. The method details are published in ISMIR 2006 proceedings. As an extension to this method, we use a simple F0 estimate selection to produce the required F0 trajectory for the task evaluation. Although the method was developed for the automatic transcription of singing melodies in polyphonic music, it is also applicable in general melody transcription tasks.