Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts- P8: The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player and online games, technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created a new form of entertainment and art, which attracts and absorbs their participants. The fantastic success of this new field has influenced the development of the new digital entertainment industry and related products and services, which has impacted every aspect of our lives. | 200 . Yan and . Kankanhalli Although an audio clip has a plurality of features not all of them are useful for our purpose. In this chapter we use three features - pitch tempo and loudness for removing artifacts in order to produce a rendition as close to the original as possible. We have selected pitch tempo and loudness as features since they are the primary determinants of the quality of a rendition. Moreover they are relatively easy to compute and manipulate which is what we need to do in order to remove the artifacts . This research is a part of our overall program in multimedia video audio and photographs artifacts handling. We detect and correct those artifacts generated by limitations of either handling skills or consumer-quality equipment. The basic idea is to perform multimedia analysis in order to attenuate the effect of annoying artifacts by feature alteration 13 . Related Work Given the popularity of karaoke there has been a lot of work concerning pitch correction key scoring gender-shifting spatial effects harmony duet and tempo key control 5 6 7 8 . What is noteworthy is that most of these techniques work in the analog domain and are thus not applicable in the digital domain. Interestingly most of the work has been published as patents. Also they all attempt to adjust the karaoke output since most karaoke users are amateur singers. The patent 7 detects the actual gender of the live singing voice so as to control the voice changer to select either of the male-to-female and female-to-male conversions if the actual gender differs from the given gender so that the pitch of the live singing voice is shifted to match the given gender of the karaoke song. In the patent 5 a plurality of singing voices are converted into those of the original singers voice signals. In patent 8 the pitches of the user sound input and the music are extracted and compared in order to change it. Textual lyrics 12 have been automatically synchronized with acoustic musical .
