A robust music retrieval method for query-by-humming

The increasing availability of digital music has created a need for effective music retrieval methods. We present a novel content-based music retrieval method that is robust against pitch errors and tempo variations in the queries, which is especially advantageous for query-by-humming. The melody of a music item and that of a hummed query are represented by point sequences, and the skeletons of the melody are used to do melody searching and alignment. A novel point skipping dynamic programming algorithm is proposed for robust and efficient melody skeleton matching. The melody similarity measure is then computed based on the alignment of the point sequences. Our experiment, including a comparison to our previous methods, has demonstrated the performance of the method.