A Query by Humming System that Learns from Experience

Query-by-Humming (QBH) systems transcribe a sung or hummed query and search for related musical themes in a database, returning the most similar themes. Since it is not possible to predict all individual singer profiles before system deployment, a robust QBH system should be able to adapt to different singers after deployment. Currently deployed systems do not have this capability. We describe a new QBH system that learns from user provided feedback on the search results, letting the system improve while deployed, after only a few queries. This is made possible by a trainable note segmentation system, an easily parameterized singer error model and a straight-forward genetic algorithm. Results show significant improvement in performance given only ten example queries from a particular user.

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