Real-time synchronisation of multimedia streams in a mobile device

With the constant improvements in the technical capabilities and bandwidth available to mobile phones, mobile audio and video streaming services are booming. This allows music enthusiasts to watch their favourite music videos instead of only listening to the audio tracks, thus augmenting their listening experience to be multimodal. Usually the highly compressed audio tracks in these videos result in poorer quality music, compared to music the user might already have locally on their phone or playing through another sound source. In this paper we present MuViSync Mobile, a mobile phone application that synchronises real-time high quality music, either stored locally or input through the microphone, with the corresponding streaming music video. We extend previous work on music to music video synchronisation by proposing an alternative algorithm for higher efficiency with similar alignment accuracy, which we tested with music video examples including simulated noise. This algorithm correctly aligns 90% of the audio frames to within 100 ms of the known alignment. We also describe its implementation on an iPhone.