Dzhambazov G, Miron M, Serra X. Lyrics to audio alignment in polyphonic audio. Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX 2017)

In this paper we describe the two algorithms we submitted for the MIREX 2017 task of Automatic Lyrics-to-Audio Alignment. The task has as a goal the automatic detection of word boundaries in multi-instrumental English pop music. We rely on a phonetic recognizer based on hidden Markov models (HMM): a widely-used method for tracking phonemes in speech processing problems. Tracking lyrics in music audio is harder than tracking text in speech because, unlike speech, the singing voice is mixed with multiple instruments. To address this obstacle we propose the application of two separate methods for segregating the singing voice from the multi-instrumental mix. One of them is based on the detection of vocal harmonic partials, whereas the other extracts the vocal content by means of source separation.

Additional material:

• Software https://github.com/georgid