Real-time Accompaniment Using Lyrics-Matching Query-by-Humming (QBH)

We present an automatic accompaniment system for the singing voice, which allows the user to begin singing from any point within the piece he/she desires. The system is based on the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm, which is used as both a similarity measure as well as an alignment tool between the live performance and the reference. The user’s position within the piece is initially determined with a variation of current Query by humming/singing methods, based on three sets of acoustic features; pitch trajectory, RMS energy envelope and MFCCs. After locating the user, the system adapts the tempo of the accompaniment utilizing a known on-line DTW method. The system is implemented in MATLAB and Java, while audio playback is handled using Max/MSP.