Beat Tracking with Dynamic Programming

Abstract

There are many applications for which we would like to be able to track the ‘beat’ of a piece of recorded music ‐ analogous to a listener’s foot-tapping. This paper describes our beat-tracking system, which operates by first estimating a global tempo (via autocorrelation of an ‘onset strength’ signal), then using dynamic programming to find the best sequence of beat times through the whole piece that both places beats on moments of high ‘onset strength’, as well as maintaining a spacing between beats that agrees with the global tempo. This system has been submitted to the 2006 MIREX Audio Tempo Extraction and Audio Beat Tracking competitions.