1. Valero-Mas, J.J.; Salamon, J.; Gómez, E.

, vol. Proceedings of the 12th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC), pp. 371--378. Maynooth, Ireland (2015)

Query-by-Humming (QBH) systems base their operation on aligning the melody sung/hummed by a user with a set of candidate melodies retrieved from music tunes. While MIDI-based QBH builds on the premise of existing annotated transcriptions for any candidate song, audio-based research makes use of melody extraction algorithms for the music tunes. In both cases, a melody abstraction process is required for solving issues commonly found in queries such as key transpositions or tempo deviations. Automatic music transcription is commonly used for this, but due to the reported limitations in state-of-the-art methods for real-world queries, other possibilities should be considered. In this work we explore three different melody representations, ranging from a general time-series one to more musical abstractions, which avoid the automatic transcription step, in the context of an audio-based QBH system. Results show that this abstraction process plays a key role in the overall accuracy of the system, obtaining the best scores when temporal segmentation is dynamically performed in terms of pitch change events in the melodic contour.