Automatic evaluation of singing enthusiasm for karaoke

Evaluation of singing skill is a popular function of karaoke machines. Here, we introduce a different aspect of evaluating the singing voice of an amateur singer: "singing enthusiasm". First, we investigated whether human listeners can evaluate singing enthusiasm consistently and whether the listener's perception matches the singer's intended enthusiasm. We then identified three acoustic features relevant to the perception of singing enthusiasm: A-weighted power, "fall-down", and vibrato extent. Finally, we developed a method for combining the selected three features to estimate the value of singing enthusiasm, and obtained a correlation coefficient of 0.65 between the estimated value and human evaluation.