Melody extraction journal article published

Our article about pitch estimation for melody extraction in symphonic classical music has been published at the Journal of New Music Research, and is now available online:

Bosch, J., Marxer, R., Gomez, E., “Evaluation and Combination of Pitch Estimation Methods for Melody Extraction in Symphonic Classical Music”, Journal of New Music Research, DOI:10.1080/09298215.2016.1182191

The dataset created in this work has also just been released:

Orchset dataset released!

Abstract:

The extraction of pitch information is arguably one of the most important tasks in automatic music description systems. However, previous research and evaluation datasets dealing with pitch estimation focused on relatively limited kinds of musical data. This work aims to broaden this scope by addressing symphonic western classical music recordings, focusing on pitch estimation for melody extraction. This material is characterized by a high number of overlapping sources, and by the fact that the melody may be played by different instrumental sections, often alternating within an excerpt. We evaluate the performance of eleven state-of-the-art pitch salience functions, multipitch estimation and melody extraction algorithms when determining the sequence of pitches corresponding to the main melody in a varied set of pieces. An important contribution of the present study is the proposed evaluation framework, including the annotation methodology, generated dataset and evaluation metrics. The results show that the assumptions made by certain methods hold better than others when dealing with this type of music signal, leading to a better performance. Additionally, we propose a simple method for combining the output of several algorithms, with promising results.

Orchset dataset released!

We are glad to announce the release of Orchset, a dataset for the development and evaluation of audio melody extraction algorithms. This collection contains 64 audio excerpts focused on symphonic music. with their corresponding annotation of the melody.

The dataset creation comprised several tasks: excerpts selection, recording sessions of people singing along with the excerpts, analysis of the recordings and melody annotation. A complete description of the dataset and the creation methodology is presented in this article:

Bosch, J., Marxer, R., Gomez, E., “Evaluation and Combination of Pitch Estimation Methods for Melody Extraction in Symphonic Classical Music”, Journal of New Music Research, DOI:10.1080/09298215.2016.1182191

Find more info and get the dataset here.