Lyric synchronizer: Automatic synchronization system between musical audio signals and lyrics

This paper describes a system that can automatically synchronize polyphonic musical audio signals with their corresponding lyrics. Although methods for synchronizing monophonic speech signals and corresponding text transcriptions by using Viterbi alignment techniques have been proposed, these methods cannot be applied to vocals in CD recordings because vocals are often overlapped by accompaniment sounds. In addition to a conventional method for reducing the influence of the accompaniment sounds, we therefore developed four methods to overcome this problem: a method for detecting vocal sections, a method for constructing robust phoneme networks, a method for detecting fricative sounds, and a method for adapting a speech-recognizer phone model to segregated vocal signals. We then report experimental results for each of these methods and also describe our music playback interface that utilizes our system for synchronizing music and lyrics.