Competence-Based Song Recommendation: Matching Songs to One's Singing Skill

Singing is a popular social activity and a pleasant way of expressing one's feelings. One important reason for unsuccessful singing performance is because the singer fails to choose a suitable song. In this paper, we propose a novel competence-based song recommendation framework for the purpose of singing. It is distinguished from most existing music recommendation systems which rely on the computation of listeners' interests or similarity. We model a singer's vocal competence as a singer profile, which takes voice pitch, intensity, and quality into consideration. Then we propose techniques to acquire singer profiles. We also present a song profile model which is used to construct a human annotated song database. Then we propose a learning-to-rank scheme for recommending songs by a singer profile. Finally, we introduce a reduced singer profile which can greatly simplify the vocal competence modelling process. The experimental study on real singers demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach and its advantages over two baseline methods.