A Supervised Approach to Hierarchical Metrical Cycle Tracking from Audio Music Recordings

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A Supervised Approach to Hierarchical Metrical Cycle Tracking from Audio Music Recordings

Ajay Srinivasamurthy, Xavier Serra

Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2014) (pp. 5237–5241), 2014, Florence, Italy

Abstract: A supervised approach to metrical cycle tracking from audio is presented, with a main focus on tracking the tāḷa, the hierarchical cyclic metrical structure in Carnatic music. Given the tāḷa of a piece, we aim to estimate the akṣara (lowest metrical pulse), the akṣara period, and the sama (first pulse of the tāḷa cycle). Starting with percussion enhanced audio, we estimate the akṣara pulse period from a tempogram computed using an onset detection function. A novelty function is computed using a self similarity matrix constructed using frame level audio features. These are then used to estimate possible akṣara and sama candidates, followed by a candidate selection based on periodicity constraints, which leads to the final estimates. The algorithm is tested on an annotated collection of 176 pieces spanning four different tāḷa. Though applied to Carnatic music, the framework presented is general and can be extended to other music cultures with cyclical metrical structures.

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