Automatic Synchronization between Lyrics and Music CD Recordings Based on Viterbi Alignment of Segregated Vocal Signals

This paper describes a system that can automatically synchronize between polyphonic musical audio signals and corresponding lyrics. Although there were methods that can synchronize between monophonic speech signals and corresponding text transcriptions by using Viterbi alignment techniques, they cannot be applied to vocals in CD recordings because accompaniment sounds often overlap with vocals. To align lyrics with such vocals, we therefore developed three methods: a method for segregating vocals from polyphonic sound mixtures, a method for detecting vocal sections, and a method for adapting a speech-recognizer phone model to segregated vocal signals. Experimental results for 10 Japanese popular-music songs showed that our system can synchronize between music and lyrics with satisfactory accuracy for 8 songs