Development and implementation of a scoring algorithm for a karaoke game

Background:
The plan is to create a karaoke-like game for the web. To make the game interesting there must be a way to set point or score to the performance of the singing player. The company has access to ordinary music files and every music file has complementary mono sound files (mono wav) that contains a single sound source called queue files. The single sound source in the queue files represents all the tones and length of the tones that the player should sing to gain points. The idea is to analyze these sound files and transform the wav data to a data format that is based on a scoring model for singing.

Problem statement:
The project participants should create
- An algorithm for transforming queue files to another data format that is more suited for real time comparison with the sound coming in from a microphone (this data format is called scoring model files).
- Look at different algorithms for doing the comparison between the scoring model and with the sound coming in from a microphone used in the game client.

The scoring model should take the following in to consieration: The pitch of each tone, the duration of each tone and possibly estimating the tempo. However, we are open to discuss the scoring model and encourage the project participants to use their creativity and ideas.

The theoretical part should contain a comparison off different approaches and a estimate what precision the different approaches have and how costly they are in terms of computer resources.

Example of interesting subjects for a paper could be:
- What approach gives best precision to the lowest cost of computer
resources (game client related).
- What approach gives best precision and the lowest latency (game client related).
- How to analyze rhythm and tone in music.

It would be interesting to implement the tool that transforms the queue files (any programming language) to scoring model files and a simple game client (in java) that uses the scoring model files.

References:
http://insidan.kth.se/medi/mobilkompositor/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraStar
http://www.s3.kth.se/signal/project_course/2004/green/