Lyrics-to-Audio Alignment and its Application

Automatic lyrics-to-audio alignment techniques have been drawing attention in the last years and various studies have been made in this field. The objective of lyrics-to-audio alignment is to estimate a temporal relationship between lyrics and musical audio signals and can be applied to various applications such as Karaoke-style lyrics display. In this contribution, we provide an overview of recent development in this research topic, where we put a particular focus on categorization of various methods and on applications

A Modeling of Singing Voice Robust to Accompaniment Sounds and Its Application to Singer Identification and Vocal-Timbre-Similarity-Based Music Information Retrieval

This paper describes a method of modeling the characteristics of a singing voice from polyphonic musical audio signals including sounds of various musical instruments. Because singing voices play an important role in musical pieces with vocals, such representation is useful for music information retrieval systems. The main problem in modeling the characteristics of a singing voice is the negative influences caused by accompaniment sounds. To solve this problem, we developed two methods, accompaniment sound reduction and reliable frame selection . The former makes it possible to calculate feature vectors that represent a spectral envelope of a singing voice after reducing accompaniment sounds. It first extracts the harmonic components of the predominant melody from sound mixtures and then resynthesizes the melody by using a sinusoidal model driven by these components. The latter method then estimates the reliability of frame of the obtained melody (i.e., the influence of accompaniment sound) by using two Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) for vocal and nonvocal frames to select the reliable vocal portions of musical pieces. Finally, each song is represented by its GMM consisting of the reliable frames. This new representation of the singing voice is demonstrated to improve the performance of an automatic singer identification system and to achieve an MIR system based on vocal timbre similarity

THREE TECHNIQUES FOR IMPROVING AUTOMATIC SYNCHRONIZATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND LYRICS: FRICATIVE DETECTION, FILLER MODEL, AND NOVEL FEATURE VECTORS FOR VOCAL ACTIVITY DETECTION

Three techniques are described that improve a previously developed system for automatically synchronizing lyrics with musical audio signals. Although this system achieves state-of-the-art accuracy by extracting vocal vowels from polyphonic sound mixtures and using forced alignment between those vowels and a phoneme network of the lyrics, there was still room for improvement. The first technique detects nonexistence regions in which fricative consonant sounds do not exist, which were not utilized in the previous system, and prohibits the alignment of the fricative phonemes to those regions. The second technique inserts a filler model between phrases of the phoneme network. This model improves the accuracy of the forced alignment by ignoring inter-phrase vowel utterances not included in the lyrics. The third technique introduces novel feature vectors for vocal activity detection that enable a distance calculation between two sets of the harmonic structure without estimating their spectral envelopes. Experimental results showed that all three techniques contribute to improved synchronization

Morphological Characteristics of Olecranon Fractures in Adults: a Computed Tomography-based Study

The aim of this study was to identify the fragment’s shape by evaluating olecranon fractures. We examined the CT images of 48 olecranon fractures (28 women and 20 men).Mean age was 59.9 years. On the olecranon’s posterior surface, we measured the distance between the apex of the olecranon fragment and the radial edge of the flat spot on the short axis and the width of the flat spot on the same short axis. The tip radial ratio (i.e., the tip radial edge to the flat spot width) was derived from these parameters. The mean tip radial edge was 1.96mm, and the flat spot width was 12.64mm; therefore, the tip radial ratio was 0.15mm. Radial inclination on the articular surface was 30.55˚. Our findings confirmed our hypothesis that the fracture lines run from the proximal ulnar side to the distal radial side on the olecranon’s posterior and articular surfaces

Lyricsto-audio alignment and phrase-level segmentation using incomplete internet-style chord annotations

We propose two novel lyrics-to-audio alignment methods which make use of additional chord information. In the first method we extend an existing hidden Markov model (HMM) for lyrics alignment [1] by adding a chord model based on the chroma features often used in automatic audio chord detection. However, the textual transcriptions found on the Internet usually provide chords only for the first among all verses (or choruses, etc.). The second method we propose is therefore designed to work on these incomplete transcriptions by finding a phrase-level segmentation of the song using the partial chord information available. This segmentation is then used to constrain the lyrics alignment. Both methods are tested against hand-labelled ground truth annotations of word beginnings. We use our first method to show that chords and lyrics complement each other, boosting accuracy from 59.1 % (only chroma feature) and 46.0 % (only phoneme feature) to 88.0 % (0.51 seconds mean absolute displacement). Alignment performance decreases with incomplete chord annotations, but we show that our second method compensates for this information loss and achieves an accuracy of 72.7%. 1

The Threat of Longitudinal Cracking after Distal Radius Fracture Treatment with Volar Locking Plate

The purpose of this study was to examine the occurrence rate of longitudinal cracks and associated characteristics following volar locking plate fixation of the distal radius. Using case records from Shizuoka Saiseikai General Hospital dated between March 2008 and March 2015, a total of 419 eligible adult patients were identified. Standard anteroposterior postoperative radiographs were evaluated to classify longitudinal crack occurrence. Documented variables were compared between patients with longitudinal cracking and those without. Univariate analyses were conducted among each plate group. There were 38 confirmed cases of cracking (Acu-Loc: n=25, Acu-Loc 2: n=11, VA-TCP: n=2). All cracks healed within 4 to 6 weeks after the operation. Plate type, along with patient age and sex were significantly associated with the occurrence of a longitudinal crack (p<0.05). Although no severe complications related to longitudinal cracking were observed, associated risks for specific patient groups should be considered