Deep Learning Approaches for Automatic Drum Transcription

Abstract

Drum transcription is the task of transcribing audio or music into drum notation. Drum notation is helpful to help drummers as instruction in playing drums and could also be useful for students to learn about drum music theories. Unfortunately, transcribing music is not an easy task. A good transcription can usually be obtained only by an experienced musician. On the other side, musical notation is beneficial not only for professionals but also for amateurs. This study develops an Automatic Drum Transcription (ADT) application using the segment and classify method with Deep Learning as the classification method. The segment and classify method is divided into two steps. First, the segmentation step achieved a score of 76.14% in macro F1 after doing a grid search to tune the parameters. Second, the spectrogram feature is extracted on the detected onsets as the input for the classification models. The models are evaluated using the multi-objective optimization (MOO) of macro F1 score and time consumption for prediction. The result shows that the LSTM model outperformed the other models with MOO scores of 77.42%, 86.97%, and 82.87% on MDB Drums, IDMT-SMT Drums, and combined datasets, respectively. The model is then used in the ADT application. The application is built using the FastAPI framework, which delivers the transcription result as a drum tab.