Selection of melody lines for music databases

One major approach to music retrieval is to model music as a sequence of features, after which traditional information retrieval techniques are applied on the sequence. Because of the temporal nature of music and the inexactness of user queries, most effort on music retrieval systems focus on issues such as indexing and approximation match. In contrast, the processing of music before feature extraction, such as the identification of a melody track, were often considered easy or done. This may be the case in a controlled environment, such as one for musicology research, where the pieces are carefully analyzed by human beings before being submitted to the database. However, in an environment where large volumes of music is obtained from the Web, manual music analysis is impractical. Since many well-known musical features often pertain to the melody of musical pieces, and users often remember the melody of a song, algorithms that select the melody tracks of a piece are important for Web-based content-based retrieval systems. We describe a number of algorithms for automatic melody track selection in a music retrieval context. We also study the performance of the algorithms by comparing their answers to those judged by human beings