Current melody extraction approaches perform poorly on the genre of opera [1, 2]. The singer’s formant is defined as a prominent spectral-envelope peak around 3 kHz found in the singing of professional Western opera singers [3]. In this paper we introduce a novel melody extraction algorithm based on this feature for opera signals. At the front end, it automatically detects the singer’s formant ...

Many studies have shown that attention modulates the cortical representation of an auditory scene, emphasizing an attended source while suppressing competing sources. Yet, individual differences in the strength of this attentional modulation and their relationship with selective attention ability are poorly understood. Here, we ask whether differences in how strongly attention modulates cortica...

This paper describes a set of statistical relationships between pitch change structure and timing structures in ordinary melodies. We obtained over 5000 MIDI files for ordinary western melodies, each with a prescribed tempo, so that note timings could be given in seconds. 1): We find that the frequencies of occurrence of different pitch change sizes are stationary: they do not vary during the t...

Three experiments were designed to investigate two explanations for the integration effect in memory for songs (Serafine, Crowder, & Repp, 1984; Serafine, Davidson, Crowder, & Repp, 1986). The integration effect is the finding that recognition of the melody (or text) of a song is better in the presence of the text (or melody) with which it had been heard originally than in the presence of a dif...

Human fetuses are able to memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language. Newborns prefer their mother's voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech ("motherese"). Their perceptual preference for the surr...

Query by humming' is an interaction concept in which the identity of a song has to be revealed fast and orderly from a given sung input using a large database of known melodies. In short, it tries to detect the pitches in a sung melody and compares these pitches with symbolic representations of the known melodies. Melodies that are similar to the sung pitches are retrieved. Approximate pattern ...

Most existing neural network models for music generation use recurrent neural networks. However, the recent WaveNet model proposed by DeepMind shows that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can also generate realistic musical waveforms in the audio domain. Following this light, we investigate using CNNs for generating melody (a series of MIDI notes) one bar after another in the symbolic domain...

This work deals with the task of melody extraction from symphonic music recordings, where the term ‘melody’ is understood as ‘the single (monophonic) pitch sequence that a listener might reproduce if asked to whistle or hum a piece of polyphonic music and that a listener would recognise as being the “essence” of that music when heard in comparison’. Melody extraction algorithms are commonly eva...

Human beings have a very sophisticated sense of hearing. While the physiological aspects of the auditory systems are well established, the perceptual and cognitive aspects are still not well understood. One active field of research in computer audition is automatic melody extraction from audio. The applications range from query-byhumming to genre classification and cover detection. On the cogni...

By means of fMRI measurements, the present study identifies brain regions in left and right peri-sylvian areas that subserve grammatical or prosodic processing. Normal volunteers heard 1) normal sentences; 2) so-called syntactic sentences comprising syntactic, but no lexical-semantic information; and 3) manipulated speech signals comprising only prosodic information, i.e., speech melody. For al...