Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Creating data resources for designing usercentric frontends for query-by-humming systems

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Multimedia Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Advances in music retrieval research greatly depend on appropriate database resources and their meaningful organization. In this paper we describe data collection efforts related to the design of query-by-humming (QBH) systems. We also provide a statistical analysis for categorizing the collected data, especially focusing on intersubject variability issues. In total, 100 people participated in our experiment, resulting in around 2000 humming samples drawn from a predefined melody list consisting of 22 different well-known music pieces and over 500 samples of melodies that were chosen spontaneously by our subjects. These data are being made available to the research community. The data from each subject were compared to the expected melody features, and an objective measure was derived to quantify the statistical deviation from the baseline. The results showed that the uncertainty in human humming varies depending on the musical structure of the melodies and the musical background of the subjects. Such details are important for designing robust QBH systems.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Shih, H.-H., Narayanan, S.S., Kuo, C.-C.J.: An HMM-based approach to humming transcription. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME2002) (2002)

  2. Shih, H.-H., Narayanan, S.S., Kuo, C.-C.J.: Multidimensional humming transcription using hidden markov models for query by humming systems. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (2003)

  3. Desain, H., van Thienen, W.: Computational modeling of music cognition: problem or solution? Music Percept. 16(1),151–166 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bamberger, J.: Turning music theory on its ear. Int. J. Comput. Math. Learn. 1(1) 33–55 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Taelte, L., Cutietta, R.: In: Colwell, R., Richardson, C. (eds.): Learning Theories Unique to Music, Chap 17: Learning theories as roots of current musical practice and research, pp. 286–298. New York: Oxford University Press (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Ghias, A., Logan, J., Chamberlin, D., Smith, B.C.: Query by humming: musical information retrieval in an aoudio database. In: Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conferenece'95, San Francisco (1995)

  7. McNab, R.J., Smith, L.A., Witten, I.H., Henderson, C.L., Cunningham, S.J.: Towards the digital music library: tune retrieval from acoustic input. In: Digital Libraries Conference (1996)

  8. McNab, R.J., Smith, L.A., Witten, I.H., Henderson, C.L.: Tune retrieval in multimedia library. In: Proceedings of Multimedia Tools and Apllications (2000)

  9. Blackburn, S., DeRoure, D.: A tool for content based navigation of music. In: Proceedings of ACM Multimedia, vol. 98, pp. 361–368 (1998)

  10. Rolland, P.Y., Raskins, G., Ganascia, J.G.: Music content-based retrieval: an overview of melodiscoc approach and systems. In: Proceedings of ACM Multimedia, vol. 99, pp. 81–84 (1999)

  11. Shih, H.-H., Zhang, T., Kuo, C.-C.: Real-time retrieval of song from music database with query-by-humming. In: Proceedings of ISMIP, pp. 251–257 (1999)

  12. Chen, B., Roger Jang, J.-S.: Query by singing. In: Proceedings of the 11th IPPR Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, Taiwan, pp. 529–536 (1998)

  13. Lu, L., You, H., Zhang, H.-J.: A new approach to query by humming in music retrieval. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (2001)

  14. Uitdenbogerd, A.L., Yap, Y.: Was Parsons right? An experiment in usability of music representations for melody-based music retrieval. In: Proceedings of the International Conference in Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) (2003)

  15. Haus, G., Pollstri, E.: An audio front end for query-by-humming systems. In: Proceedings of International Conference in Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) (2001)

  16. Zhu, Y., Sasha, D.: Warping indexes with envelope transforms for query-by-humming systems. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD (2003)

  17. Unal, E., Narayanan, S.S., Chew, E.: A statistical aproach to retrieval under user-dependent uncertainty in query-by-humming systems. In: Proceedings of ACM MIR04 (2004)

  18. Doraisamy, S., Ruger, S.: A comparative and fault-tolerance study of the use of n-grams with polyphonic music. In: Proceedings of the International Conference in Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) (2002)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Erdem Unal, S. S. Narayanan & H.-H. Shih

  2. Integrated Media Systems Center, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Elaine Chew & C.-C. Jay Kuo

Authors
  1. Erdem Unal
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. S. S. Narayanan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. H.-H. Shih
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Elaine Chew
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. C.-C. Jay Kuo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Erdem Unal.

Additional information

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Unal, E., Narayanan, S.S., Shih, HH. et al. Creating data resources for designing usercentric frontends for query-by-humming systems. Multimedia Systems 10, 475–483 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-005-0176-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-005-0176-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation