Melodic Query Input for Music Information Retrieval Systems - Intelligent Music Information Systems: Tools and Methodologies - page 62

Out To The Ballgame (d01) and Somewhere
Over The Rainbow (d06) both begin with
the notes of the melody rising by an entire
octave.

in Experiment 3. Instead, general statistics are
presented from these user trials, along the lines
of the studies performed by Halpern (1989) and
by Levitin (1994).
One important feature we analyzed was the
relationship between the duration of a hummed
note and the elapsed time from the beginning
of that note to the start of the note that followed
it. We refer to this as the inter-note onset time
(INOT). Differences between these two values
occur naturally in many songs when musical rests
have been written into the tune (i.e., intentional
gaps between successive notes). Testing this
relationship was not part of the original design
of the experiment, but informal analysis of the
collected data revealed a significant difference
between the two which we found important to
quantify formally.
For one of the songs in this experiment, we
manually produced our own transcriptions of
each subject's humming by listening to the audio
recordings. These were compared with those
produced by the Autoscore software with the
goal of quantifying the frequency and severity
of errors introduced into the data by the music
transcription process itself.

• Songs such as The Star-Spangled Banner

(d09) were chosen because their melodies
span a wide pitch range despite the fact
they do not contain large pitch intervals.
Attempting to hum such songs requires care-
ful selection of the starting pitch in order to
remain within a comfortable singing range
when vocalizing subsequent notes.

• Also included were songs for which indi-

vidual renditions frequently produce varia-
tions in notes or rhythm. For instance, the
first two notes of The Star-Spangled Banner
are commonly sung in one of two different
rhythms: either both notes are given the
same duration, or the first has twice the
duration of the second. Another of the songs
used here, Amazing Grace (d05), often has
extra ornamental or grace notes added by
individual performers.

The lack of constraints on how much the sub-
jects were expected to hum, combined with the
problem of occasional missing or extraneous notes
as recorded by the transcription process, made it
impossible to automatically measure in complete
detail the subjects' performances with respect to
the intended database song for features such as
the ability to reproduce arbitrary pitch intervals.
Formal analysis of these features was left for the
more tightly controlled experimental trials utilized

Method

Subjects were presented with the names of 12
popular tunes familiar to most Americans, along
with a portion of the lyrics to the song (except for
two of the songs which had no associated lyrics).
They were asked to hum as much of the tune as
they were comfortable in doing. A list of the set

Table 1. Songs used in Experiment 1

d01 Take Me Out To The Ballgame d07 Bridal Chorus (Richard Wagner)

d02 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star d08 Yankee Doodle

d03 Jingle Bells d09 The Star-Spangled Banner

d04 Beethoveen's 5th Symphony, 1st Mvmt. d10 Happy Birthday To You

d05 Amazing Grace d11 Theme from Gilligan's Island

d06 Somewhere Over The Rainbow d12 Main Theme, Raiders of the Lost Ark