Abstract-A method is decribed which analyzes the basic pattern of beats in a piece of music, the musical meter. The analysis is performed jointly at three different time scales: at the temporally atomic tatum pulse level, at the tactus pulse level which corresponds to the tempo of a piece, and at the musical measure level. Acoustic signals from arbitrary musical genres are considered. For the initial time-frequency analysis, a new technique is proposed which measures the degree of musical accent as a function of time at four different frequency ranges. This is followed by a bank of comb filter resonators which extracts features for estimating the periods and phases of the three pulses. The features are processed by a probabilistic model which represents primitive musical knowledge and uses the low-level observations to perform joint estimation of the tatum, tactus, and measure pulses. The model takes into account the temporal dependencies between successive estimates and enables both causal and noncausal analysis. The method is validated using a manually annotated database of 474 music signals from various genres. The method works robustly for different types of music and improves over two state-of-the-art reference methods in simulations.Index Terms-Acoustic signal analysis, music, musical meter analysis, music transcription.

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This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Abstract Automatic music transcription is considered by many to be a key enabling technology in music signal processing. However, the performance of transcription systems is still significantly below that of a human expert, and accuracies reported in recent years seem to have reached a limit, although the field is still very active. In this paper we analyse limitations of current methods and identify promising directions for future research. Current transcription methods use general purpose models which are unable to capture the rich diversity found in music signals. One way to overcome the limited performance of transcription systems is to tailor algorithms to specific use-cases. Semi-automatic approaches are another way of achieving a more reliable transcription. Also, the wealth of musical scores and corresponding audio data now available are a rich potential source of training data, via forced alignment of audio to scores, but large scale utilisation of such data has yet to be attempted. Other promising approaches include the integration of information from multiple algorithms and different musical aspects. Permanent repository link

A system was designed, which is able to detect the perceptual onsets of sounds in acoustic signals. The system is general in regard to the sounds involved and was found to be robust for different kinds of signals. This was achieved without assuming regularities in the positions of the onsets. In this paper, a method is first proposed that can determine the beginnings of sounds that exhibit onset imperfections, i.e., the amplitude envelope of which does not rise monotonically. Then the mentioned system is described, which utilizes band-wise processing and a psychoacoustic model of intensity coding to combine the results from the separate frequency bands. The performance of the system was validated by applying it to the detection of onsets in musical signals that ranged from rock to classical and big band recordings.

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We report on the tempo induction contest organized during the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2004) held at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2004. The goal of this contest was to evaluate some state-of-the-art algorithms in the task of inducing the basic tempo (as a scalar, in beats per minute) from musical audio signals. To our knowledge, this is the first published large scale cross-validation of audio tempo induction algorithms. Participants were invited to submit algorithms to the contest organizer, in one of several allowed formats. No training data was provided. A total of 12 entries (representing the work of seven research teams) were evaluated, 11 of which are reported in this document. Results on the test set of 3199 instances were returned to the participants before they were made public. Anssi Klapuri's algorithm won the contest. This evaluation shows that tempo induction algorithms can reach over 80% accuracy for music with a constant tempo, if we do not insist on finding a specific metrical level. After the competition, the algorithms and results were analyzed in order to discover general lessons for the future development of tempo induction systems. One conclusion is that robust tempo induction entails the processing of frame features rather than that of onset lists. Further, we propose a new "redundant" approach to tempo induction, inspired by knowledge of human perceptual mechanisms, which combines multiple simpler methods using a voting mechanism. Machine emulation of human tempo induction is still an open issue. Many avenues for future work in audio tempo tracking are highlighted, as for instance the definition of the best rhythmic features and the most appropriate periodicity detection method. In order to stimulate further research, the contest results, annotations, evaluation software and part of the data are available at http://ismir2004.ismir.net/ISMIR-Contest.html

Abstract-Music signal processing may appear to be the junior relation of the large and mature field of speech signal processing, not least because many techniques and representations originally developed for speech have been applied to music, often with good results. However, music signals possess specific acoustic and structural characteristics that distinguish them from spoken language or other nonmusical signals. This paper provides an overview of some signal analysis techniques that specifically address musical dimensions such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. We will examine how particular characteristics of music signals impact and determine these techniques, and we highlight a number of novel music analysis and retrieval tasks that such processing makes possible. Our goal is to demonstrate that, to be successful, music audio signal processing techniques must be informed by a deep and thorough insight into the nature of music itself.

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