TuneRank Model for Main Melody Extraction from Multi-part Musical Scores

A musical part is a strand of music played by an individual instrument within a larger music work, main melody is a single musical part which consists of the most significant melodic elements of multi-part musical score. This part is typically related to dissonance between musical parts and musical instruments. In this paper, we propose a novel model for extracting the main melody from multi-part musical scores. This model is referred to as the TuneRank model that has the conceptually similar idea of the PageRank model. If each musical note can be considered like a web page in the Internet, and the dissonance value between two notes is like the quantity of links between two web pages. The TuneRank (rank of becoming main melody) of each note is calculated using Markov transition probability. This model is tested on the ECPK4 database. By comparing to the previous work, we find that this note-based model is more effective for processing scores containing main melody in multiple parts. Also, the accuracy does not change with the increase of the number of parts. In general, this model can be used for extracting the single-part main melody of digital musical scores.