Analysis of the meter of acoustic musical signals

Abstract

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.

Rhythmic similarity of music based on dynamic periodicity warping

“…If this information is not available, it has to be estimated from the signal or annotation work has to be performed [4]. However, tempo estimation from musical mixtures is not perfectly possible [5] and hand annotation is time consuming. Thus, an automatic derivation of the metrical structure of complex mixtures for classification purposes is not feasible yet.…”

Automatic music transcription: challenges and future directions

“…expressive features for note phrasing). Another problem which is crucial for typesetting is estimating the meter of music signals, for which a general-purpose system has not yet been developed [76].…”

Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music

“…A threshold on MMA could be established above which beat tracking was assumed to be feasible to a subjectively satisfying level. For the beat sequence evaluation in this paper, 5 out of the 17 algorithms were selected (Oliveira et al, 2010;Degara et al, 2011;Ellis, 2007;Dixon, 2007;Klapuri et al, 2006). This selection was made for several reasons.…”