The interplay of information retrieval and query by singing with words

Abstract

Speech recognition can be used in music retrieval systems to identify the words in users' sung queries. Our aim was to determine which of several techniques is most suitable for retrieving songs given a sung query with words. We used Sphinx for speech recognition, and tested several retrieval techniques on the output of the recognition system. The most effective retrieval technique was a combination of Edit Distance and Okapi, which persistently retrieved the correct song at the top one ranked results given that the queries were at least 50% correct. However, techniques performed differently when the queries were split into four buckets with varying level of correctness in the range of 0 to 73%