• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.534-546
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• 2009

Query by humming is an effective and intuitive querying mechanism when a user wants to find a song without knowing lyrics. The query by humming system takes a user-hummed melody as input, compares it with melodies in a music database, and returns top-k similar melodies to the input. In this paper, we propose a novel algebra for query by humming, and design and implement a real query by humming system called HummingBase by exploiting the algebra. By analyzing existing similarity search techniques, we derive 10 core operators for the algebra. By using the well-defined algebra, we can easily implement such a system in a extensible and modular way. With two case studies, we show that the proposed algebra can easily represent the query processing processes of existing query-by-humming systems.