Tempo Estimation Research Articles

Music Tempo Estimation With $k$-NN Regression

An approach for tempo estimation from musical pieces with near-constant tempo is proposed. The method consists of three main steps: measuring the degree of musical accent as a function of time, periodicity analysis, and tempo estimation. Novel accent features based on the chroma representation are proposed. The periodicity of the accent signal is measured using the generalized autocorrelation function, followed by tempo estimation using k-Nearest Neighbor regression. We propose a resampling step applied to an unknown periodicity vector before finding the nearest neighbors. This step improves the performance of the method significantly. The tempo estimate is computed as a distance-weighted median of the nearest neighbor tempi. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides significantly better tempo estimation accuracies than three reference methods.

Tempo and beat tracking for audio signals with music genre classification

Most people follow the music to hum or the rhythm to tap sometimes. We may get different meanings of a music style if it is explained or felt by different people. Therefore we cannot obtain a very explicit answer if there is no music notation. Tempo and beats are very important elements in the perceptual music. Therefore, tempo estimation and beat tracking are fundamental techniques in automatic audio processing, which are crucial to multimedia applications. We first develop an artificial neural network to classify the music excerpts into the evaluation preference. And then, with the preference classification, we can obtain accurate estimation for tempo and beats, by either Ellis's method or Dixon's method. We test our method with mixed data set which contains ten music genres from the 'ballroom dancer' database. Our experimental results show that the accuracy of our method is higher than only one individual Ellis's method or Dixon's method.

Template-Based Estimation of Time-Varying Tempo

We present a novel approach to automatic estimation of tempo over time. This method aims at detecting tempo at the tactus level for percussive and nonpercussive audio. The front-end of our system is based on a proposed reassigned spectral energy flux for the detection of musical events. The dominant periodicities of this flux are estimated by a proposed combination of discrete Fourier transform and frequency-mapped autocorrelation function. The most likely meter, beat, and tatum over time are then estimated jointly using proposed meter/beat subdivision templates and a Viterbi decoding algorithm. The performances of our system have been evaluated on four different test sets among which three were used during the ISMIR 2004 tempo induction contest. The performances obtained are close to the best results of this contest.

Accurate tempo estimation based on harmonic + noise decomposition

We present an innovative tempo estimation system that processes acoustic audio signals and does not use any high-level musical knowledge. Our proposal relies on a harmonic + noise decomposition of the audio signal by means of a subspace analysis method. Then, a technique to measure the degree of musical accentuation as a function of time is developed and separately applied to the harmonic and noise parts of the input signal. This is followed by a periodicity estimation block that calculates the salience of musical accents for a large number of potential periods. Next, a multipath dynamic programming searches among all the potential periodicities for the most consistent prospects through time, and finally the most energetic candidate is selected as tempo. Our proposal is validated using a manually annotated test-base containing 961 music signals from various musical genres. In addition, the performance of the algorithm under different configurations is compared. The robustness of the algorithm when processing signals of degraded quality is also measured.