Blind Clustering of Popular Music Recordings Based on Singer Voice Characteristics
View/ Open
Date
2003-10-26Author
Wei-Ho Tsai
Hsin-Min Wang
Dwight Rodgers
Shi-Sian Cheng
Hung-Min Yu
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This paper presents an effective technique for automatically clustering undocumented music recordings based on their associated singer. This serves as an indispensable step towards indexing and content-based information retrieval of music by singer. The proposed clustering system operates in an unsupervised manner, in which no prior information is available regarding the characteristics of singer voices, nor the population of singers. Methods are presented to separate vocal from non-vocal regions, to isolate the singers' vocal characteristics from the background music, to compare the similarity between singers' voices, and to determine the total number of unique singers from a collection of songs. Experimental evaluations conducted on a 200-track pop music database confirm the validity of the proposed system.