Extracting Predominant Melody from Polyphonic Music using Harmonic Structure

In this paper, we propose a method for extracting predominant melody of polyphonic music based on harmonic structure. Since polyphonic music contains multiple sound sources, the process of melody detection consists of extraction of multiple fundamental frequencies and determination of predominant melody using those fundamental frequencies. Harmonic structure is an important feature parameter of monophonic signal that has spectral peaks at the integer multiples of its fundamental frequency. We extract all fundamental frequency candidates contained in the polyphonic signal by verifying the required condition of harmonic structure. Then, we combine those harmonic peaks corresponding to each extracted fundamental frequency and assign a rank to each after calculating its harmonic average energy. We finally run pitch tracking based on the rank of extracted fundamental frequency and continuity of fundamental frequency, and determine the predominant melody. We measure the performance of proposed method using ADC 2004 DB and 100 Korean pop songs in terms of MIREX 2005 evaluation metrics, and pitch accuracy of 90.42% is obtained.