Tohoku Kiritan singing database: A singing database for statistical parametric singing synthesis using Japanese pop songs

Abstract

We have built a singing database that can be used for research purposes. Since recent songs are protected by copyright law, researchers typically use songs that can be used without copyright. With changes to the copyright law in Japan in 2019, we can now release a singing database consisting of songs protected by the law under several restrictions. Our database mainly consists of Japanese pop songs by a professional singer. We collected a total of 50 songs with around 57 minutes of vocals recorded in a studio. After recording, we labeled the phoneme boundaries and converted the songs into the MusicXML format required for the study of statistical parametric singing synthesis. Statistical analysis of the database was then carried out. First, we counted the number of phonemes to clarify their distribution. Second, we performed acoustical analysis on the distribution of pitch, the interval between notes, and duration. Results showed that although the information is biased, the amount of singing is sufficient in light of the findings of a prior study on singing synthesis. The corpus is freely available at our website, https://zunko.jp/kiridev/login.php [1].