A new method for approximate melody matching

This paper represents a new method for approximate melody matching, called Linear Alignment Matching (LAM). It takes a geometrical approach and compares melodies by matching their pitch-time contours. Error toleration mechanism is added to make the method robust against humming errors, and the melody similarity is computed from the viewpoint of both rhythm and pitch. A Query-By-Humming system is built based on LAM to test its performance 62 humming clips are searched in a music database comprising 3864 songs, and LAM's top-3 success rate is 90.3%, winning the traditional approximate string matching algorithm by 11%. This experiment result shows the validity of the "Linear Alignment Matching" method and the feasibility of using it as the query engine in large digital music libraries.