Classification-Based Melody Transcription

Abstract

The melody of a musical piece—informally, the part you would hum along with—is a useful and compact summary of a full audio recording. The extraction of melodic content has practical applications ranging from content-based audio retrieval to the analysis of musical structure. Whereas previous systems generate transcriptions based on a model of the harmonic (or periodic) structure of musical pitches, we present a classification-based system for performing automatic melody transcription that makes no assumptions beyond what is learned from its training data. We evaluate the success of our algorithm by predicting the melody of the ADC 2004 Melody Competition evaluation set, and we show that a simple frame-level note classifier, temporally smoothed by post processing with a hidden Markov model, produces results comparable to state of the art model-based transcription systems.