A query-by-humming music information retrieval from audio signals based on multiple F0 candidates

In this paper, we propose a query-by-humming (QbH) system that retrieves musical pieces given as audio signals. Most conventional QbH systems assume that the symbolic melody information is given a priori, which is not always true. In our system, the database for retrieval is generated from 1ch audio signal that contains many sounds. We generate the database by estimating fundamental frequencies (F0) of the audio signals frame by frame. To improve the retrieval accuracy, we exploit multiple F0 candidates to absorb the impact of F0 estimation errors. From the experiment, we obtained about 15 points of improvement by using multiple F0 candidates, compared with the QbH system with only one F0 candidate.