A quantitative comparison of different approaches for melody extraction from polyphonic audio recordings

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of current state-of-the-art approaches for melody extraction from polyphonic audio recordings, and it proposes a methodology for the quantitative evaluation of melody extraction algorithms. We first define a general architecture for melody extraction systems and discuss the difficulties of the problem in hand; then, we review different approaches for melody extraction which represent the current state-of-the-art in this area. We propose and discuss a methodology for evaluating the different approaches, and we finally present some results and conclusions of the comparison.