Automatic note-level transcription is considered one of the most challenging tasks in music information retrieval. The specific case of flamenco singing transcription poses a particular challenge due to its complex melodic progressions, intonation inaccuracies, the use of a high degree of ornamentation, and the presence of guitar accompaniment. In this study, we explore the limitations of existing state of the art transcription systems for the case of flamenco singing and propose a specific solution for this genre: We first extract the predominant melody and apply a novel contour filtering process to eliminate segments of the pitch contour which originate from the guitar accompaniment. We formulate a set of onset detection functions based on volume and pitch characteristics to segment the resulting vocal pitch contour into discrete note events. A quantised pitch label is assigned to each note event by combining global pitch class probabilities with local pitch contour statistics. The proposed system outperforms state of the art singing transcription systems with respect to voicing accuracy, onset detection, and overall performance when evaluated on flamenco singing datasets.
Addressing the more complex task of singing transcription from polyphonic recordings @cite_35 , a multiple fundamental frequency estimator with an accent signal in order to extract the dominant pitch trajectory. The segmentation stage relies on a probabilistic note event model, using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) trained on manual transcriptions. In an extension to this approach @cite_14 , note transition probabilities were incorporated in the computational model. Recently, this note segmentation method was implemented in the computer-aided note transcription tool tony @cite_25 . It should be mentioned that such probabilistic methods require a large amount of ground truth data during the training stage. This involves time-consuming manual annotations in particular for improvisational and strongly ornamented singing performances, as it is the case for flamenco music.
@cite_35 @cite_14 @cite_25
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This article deals with automatic transcription of flamenco music recordings-more specifically, a cappella singing. We first study the specifics of flamenco singing and propose a transcription system based on fundamental frequency and energy estimation, which incorporates an iterative strategy for note segmentation and labeling. The proposed approach is evaluated on a music collection of 72 performances, including a variety of singers and recording conditions, and the presence or absence of percussion, background voices, and noise. We obtain satisfying results for the different approaches tested, and our system outperforms a state-of-the-art approach designed for other singing styles. In this study, we discuss the difficulties found in transcribing flamenco singing and in evaluating the obtained transcriptions, we analyze the influence of the different steps of the algorithm, and we state the main limitations of our approach and discuss challenges for future studies. This paper proposes a method for the automatic transcription of singing melodies in polyphonic music. The method is based on multiple-F0 estimation followed by acoustic and musicological modeling. The acoustic model consists of separate models for singing notes and for no-melody segments. The musicological model uses key estimation and note bigrams to determine the transition probabilities between notes. Viterbi decoding produces a sequence of notes and rests as a transcription of the singing melody. The performance of the method is evaluated using the RWC popular music database for which the recall rate was 63 and precision rate 46 . A significant improvement was achieved compared to a baseline method fromMIREX05 evaluations. We present Tony, a software tool for the interactive annotation of melodies from monophonic audio recordings, and evaluate its usability and the accuracy of its note extraction method. The scientific study of acoustic performances of melodies, whether sung or played, requires the accurate transcription of notes and pitches. To achieve the desired transcription accuracy for a particular application, researchers manually correct results obtained by automatic methods. Tony is an interactive tool directly aimed at making this correction task efficient. It provides (a) state-of-the art algorithms for pitch and note estimation, (b) visual and auditory feedback for easy error-spotting, (c) an intelligent graphical user interface through which the user can rapidly correct estimation errors, (d) extensive export functions enabling further processing in other applications. We show that Tony’s built in automatic note transcription method compares favourably with existing tools. We report how long it takes to annotate recordings on a set of 96 solo vocal recordings and study the effect of piece, the number of edits made and the annotator’s increasing mastery of the software. Tony is Open Source software, with source code and compiled binaries for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux available from https: code.soundsoftware.ac.uk projects tony . Abstract We present a system for the automatic transcription of solo human singing into note sequences. Particular attention is devoted to the modelling of the transitions between consecutive notes of the sung passage. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are used to represent both individual notes and the transitions between them, in order to capture the variability of the estimated pitch within a statistical framework. A database consisting of annotated passages sung by 26 soprano subjects is compiled and used for the development of the system. Explicit transition models are introduced in order to better identify note boundaries that are otherwise poorly modelled. Context-independent transition models are evaluated first, followed by context-dependent transition models which are shown to improve both the note recognition accuracy and the transition region time-alignment. The final system is found to be able to transcribe sung passages with an overall accuracy of 86.7 .