Automatic evaluation of Karaoke singing based on pitch, volume, and rhythm features

Abstract

This study aims to develop an automatic singing evaluation system for Karaoke performances. Many Karaoke systems in the market today come with a scoring function. The addition of the feature enhances the entertainment appeal of the system due to the competitive nature of humans. The automatic Karaoke scoring mechanism to date, however, is still rudimentary, often giving inconsistent results with scoring by human raters.A cause of blunder arises from the fact that often only the singing volume is used as the evaluation criteria. To improve on the singing evaluation capabilities on Karaoke machines, this study exploits various acoustic features, including pitch, volume, and rhythm to assess a singing performance. We invited a number of singers having different levels of singing capabilities to record for Karaoke solo vocal samples. The performances were rated independently by four musicians, and then used in conjunction with additional Karaoke Video Compact Disk music for the training of our proposed system. Our experiment shows that the results of automatic singing evaluation are close to the human rating, where the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient between them is 0.82. © 2011 IEEE.