Fundamental frequency alignment vs. note-based melodic similarity for singing voice assessment

This paper presents a generic approach for automatic singing assessment for basic singing levels. The system provides the user with a set of intonation, rhythm and overall ratings obtained by measuring the similarity of the sung melody and a target performance. Two different similarity approaches are discussed: f₀ curve alignment through Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and singing transcription plus note-level similarity. From these two approaches, we extract different intonation and rhythm similarity measures which are combined through quadratic polynomial regression analysis in order to fit the judgement of 4 trained musicians on 27 performances. The results show that the proposed system is suitable for automatic singing voice rating and that DTW based measures are specially simple and effective for intonation and rhythm assessment.