HamoKara: A System that Enables Amateur Singers to Practice Backing Vocals for Karaoke

Creating harmony in karaoke by a lead vocalist and a backing vocalist is enjoyable, but backing vocals are not easy for non-advanced karaoke users. First, it is difficult to find musically appropriate submelodies (melodies for backing vocals). Second, the backing vocalist has to practice backing vocals in advance in order to play backing vocals accurately, because singing submelodies is often influenced by the singing of the main melody. In this paper, we propose a backing vocals practice system called HamoKara. This system automatically generates a submelody with a rule-based or probabilistic-model-based method, and provides users with an environment for practicing backing vocals. Users can check whether their pitch is correct through audio and visual feedback. Experimental results show that the generated submelodies are musically appropriate to some degree, and the system helped users to learn to sing submelodies to some extent.