The technology of music information retrieval (MIR) is an emerging field that helps in tagging each portion of an audio clip. A majority of the subtasks of MIR need an application that segments vocal and non-vocal portions. In this paper, an effort has been made to segment the vocal and non-vocal regions using some novel features based on formant structure on top of standard features. The features such as Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), linear prediction cepstral coefficients (LPCCs), frequency domain linear prediction (FDLP) values, statistical values of pitch, jitter, shimmer, formant attack slope (FAS), formant heights from base-to-peak (FH1), peak-to-base (FH2), formant angle values at peak (FA1), valley (FA2), and F5 have been considered. The classifiers such as artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF) have been considered for a comparative study as they are powerful enough to discover huge non-linear patterns. The concept of genetic algorithms with the support of neural networks has been used to select the relevant features rather considering all dimensions, named as a genetic algorithm based feature selection (GAFS). an accuracy of 89.23% before windowing and 95.16% after windowing is obtained with the optimal feature vector of length 32 using artificial neural networks. The system developed is capable of detecting singing voice segments with an accuracy of 98%. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd