Leveraging repetition for improved automatic lyric transcription in popular music

Transcribing lyrics from musical audio is a challenging research problem which has not benefited from many advances made in the related field of automatic speech recognition, owing to the prevalent musical accompaniment and differences between the spoken and sung voice. However, one aspect of this problem which has yet to be exploited by researchers is that significant portions of the lyrics will be repeated throughout the song. In this paper we investigate how this information can be leveraged to form a consensus transcription with improved consistency and accuracy. Our results show that improvements can be gained using a variety of techniques, and that relative gains are largest under the most challenging and realistic experimental conditions.