Melody Extraction from Polyphonic MIDI Files Based on Melody Similarity

The aim of melody extraction is to identify the melody from polyphonic musical files. Although researchers have made great progresses in this field, the need for more efficient methods is still not satisfied. This paper proposes an algorithm for extracting the main melody from polyphonic MIDI files based on the melody similarity computation. Experiments show that this approach is effective. We have applied this method in a hamming retrieval system. Compared with the manually labeled method, our method can identify the melody from MIDI files efficiently and automatically.