Skip to main content

Query by Humming

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
  • 19 Accesses

Synonyms

Music retrieval; Time series database querying

Definition

With the appearance of large scale audio and video databases in various application areas, novel information retrieval methods adapted to the specific characteristics of these data types are required. A natural way of searching in a musical audio database is by humming the tune of a song as a query, which is so-called “query by humming”. In this entry, state-of-the-art techniques for effective and efficient querying by humming are described.

Historical Background

In 1995, Asif Ghias et al. [2] proposed the basic architecture for a system supporting query by humming. Three main components are introduced in the system: a pitch-tracking module, a melody database, and a query engine. Queries are hummed into a microphone, digitized, and fed into a pitch-tracking module. Then, a symbol sequence representation upon the relative pitch transitions of the hummed melody is sent to the query engine, which produces a ranked list of...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   4,499.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD   6,499.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Recommended Reading

  1. Fu AW-C, Keogh EJ, Lau LYH, Ratanamahatana CA. Scaling and time warping in time series querying. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 2005. p. 649–60.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Ghias A, Logan J, Chamberlin D, Smith BC. Query by humming: musical information retrieval in an audio database. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia; 1995. p. 231–6.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Keogh EJ. Exact indexing of dynamic time warping. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 2002. p. 406–17.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Zhou M, Wong MH. Boundary-based lower-bound functions for dynamic time warping and their indexing. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering; 2007. p. 1307–11.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Zhu Y, Shasha D. Warping indexes with envelope transforms for query by humming. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 2003. p. 181–92.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yingyi Bu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Section Editor information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Bu, Y., Wong, R.CW., Fu, A.WC. (2018). Query by Humming. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_292

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics