The performance of melody retrieval using a query-by-humming (QBH) system depends on different parameters. For the query, parameters like length of the query and possibly contained errors influence the success of the retrieval. But also the size of the melody database inside the QBH-system has a certain impact on the query. This paper describes how the statistical parameters of a random melody ...

The study deals with the question of the manifestation of the prosodic system of a language (here Estonian) in singing. Previous research has shown that durational contrasts are neutralized in the sung version of the folksongs. The present study makes a first attempt to establish whether there is a similar neutralization of prosodic oppositions with regard to melody: whether the melody of the s...

This paper describes our submission to the audio melody extraction evaluation addressing the task of identifying the melody pitch contour from polyphonic musical audio. It shall give an overview about the algorithm and a discussion of the evaluation results. The presented algorithm is a derivative of our submission to MIREX’06. Major changes between the two versions are highlighted and the impa...

This paper reports our project on “sound education” in second language teaching in Blackfoot. “Sound” in this context refers to word melody and pitch accent. As described in (Frantz, 2009), accents in some words impact meaning. For second language learners of Blackfoot, in addition to learning words with the correct pitch accents, it is also important to learn correct word melody. Sounding “rig...

While musicians generally perform better than non-musicians in various auditory discrimination tasks, effects of specific instrumental training have received little attention. The effects of instrument-specific musical training on auditory grouping in the context of stream segregation are investigated here in three experiments. In Experiment 1a, participants listened to sequences of ABA_ tones ...

This paper presents a method for extracting vocal melodies from popular songs. Underlying the extraction procedure is a sinusoidal representation applied to the input song signal. The desired vocal melody is isolated by focusing on specific (amplitudeand frequency-modulated) sinusoids that are identified as vocal, with the identification based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation of t...

What is the involvement of what we know in what we perceive? In this article, the contribution of melodic schema-based processes to the perceptual organization of tone sequences is examined. Two unfamiliar six-tone melodies, one of which was interleaved with distractor tones, were presented successively to listeners who were required to decide whether the melodies were identical or different. I...

The brain mechanisms that subserve music recognition remain unclear despite increasing interest in this process. Here we report the results of a magnetoencephalography experiment to determine the temporal dynamics and spatial distribution of brain regions activated during listening to a familiar and unfamiliar instrumental melody in control adults and adults with Down syndrome (DS). In the cont...

Several music information retrieval (MIR) systems have been developed which retrieve musical pieces by the user’s singing voice. All of these systems use only melody information for retrieval, although lyrics information is also useful for retrieval. In this paper, we propose an MIR system that uses both melody and lyrics information in the singing voice. The MIR system verifies hypotheses outp...

In this study, we tested the hypothesis that exposure to specific auditory sequences could lead to the crossmodal induction of new motor memories. Twenty young, healthy participants memorized a melody without moving. Each tone in the memorized melody had previously been associated with a particular finger movement. For ten of the participants, the contour of the melody memorized was congruent t...