Abstract:
When making judgements, humans are known to be better at choosing a preferred option amongst a small number of options, rather than giving an absolute ranking of all the options. This preference-based judgment rank-ordering method is called Best-Worst Scaling (BWS). Inspired by this concept, we propose a preference-based framework to generate a relative rank-ordering of singing vocals, and therefore, singers. We adopt a twin-neural network (Siamese) that learns to choose a preferred candidate in terms of singing quality between two inputs. With a few such pairwise comparisons, this method generates a relative rank-order of a complete list of singers. Additionally, we incorporate a knowledge-based musically-relevant pitch histogram representation, as a conditioning vector, to provide explicit musical information to the network. The experiments show that this method is able to reliably evaluate singing quality and rank-order singing vocals, independent of the song or the singer. The results suggest that the twin-neural network learns the underlying discerning properties relevant to singing quality, instead of being specific to the content of a song or singer.
