An FFT-based fast melody comparison method for query-by-singing/humming systems

Query-by-singing/humming (QBSH) is a promising way to retrieve music recordings based on main melody’s similarity. This paper presents an efficient QBSH method that enables fast melody comparison. In contrast to the most prevalent QBSH method, which measures the distances between note sequences in the time domain, the proposed method performs distance computation in the frequency domain. This is done with the fast Fourier transform, which converts different-length note sequences into equal-dimension vectors via zero padding. The equal dimensionality allows us to compare the vectors using Euclidean distance directly, which avoids performing time-consuming alignment between sequences. To take both efficiency and effectiveness into account, the proposed fast melody comparison method is combined with the dynamic time warping technique into a two-stage sequence matching system. Our experiments show that the proposed system outperforms several existing speed-up DTW-based systems in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.

► An efficient query-by-singing/humming method is proposed to retrieve music recordings.
► The proposed method enables fast melody comparison.
► Fast melody comparison is done in the frequency domain rather than the time domain.