A novel framework for recognizing phonemes of singing voice in polyphonic music

A novel method is described that can be used to recognize the phoneme of a singing voice (vocal) in polyphonic music. Though we focus on the voiced phoneme in this paper, this method is design to concurrently recognize other elements of a singing voice such as fundamental frequency and singer. Thus, this method is considered to be a new framework for recognizing a singing voice in polyphonic music. Our method stochastically models a mixture of a singing voice and other instrumental sounds without segregating the singing voice. It can also estimate a reliable spectral envelope by estimating it from many harmonic structures with various fundamental frequencies (F0s). The results of phoneme recognition experiments with 10 popular-music songs by 6 singers showed that our method improves the recognition accuracy by 8.7 points and achieves a 20.0% decrease in error rate.