Informed Automatic Meter Analysis of Music Recordings

This is the companion webpage for the paper titled

Informed Automatic Meter Analysis of Music Recordings

Ajay Srinivasamurthy, Andre Holzapfel, Xavier Serra
 
Proceedings of the 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, 2017, Suzhou, China
 
Abstract:Automatic meter analysis aims to annotate a recording of a metered piece of music with its metrical structure. This analysis subsumes correct estimation of the type of meter, the tempo, and the alignment of the metrical structure with the music signal. Recently, Bayesian models have been successfully applied to several of meter analysis tasks, but depending on the musical context, meter analysis still poses significant challenges. In this paper, we investigate if there are benefits to automatic meter analysis from additional a priori information about the metrical structure of music. We explore informed automatic meter analysis, in which varying levels of prior information about the metrical structure of the music piece is available to analysis algorithms. We formulate different informed meter analysis tasks and discuss their practical applications, with a focus on Indian art music. We then adapt state of the art Bayesian meter analysis methods to these tasks and evaluate them on corpora of Indian art music. The experiments show that the use of additional information aids meter analysis and improves automatic meter analysis performance, with significant gains for analysis of downbeats.
 

Examples

Description of popular Carnatic taalas and a few audio examples of Carnatic music can be found here:
 
Description of popular Hindustani taals and a few audio examples of Hindustani music can be found here:
 
Some audio examples of automatic meter analysis outputs from Inference, Tracking, Tempo-informed Tracking and Sama-Tempo-informed tracking can be found here:

Dataset

The Hindustani and Carnatic music datasets used in the paper are described in detail here:

Carnatic dataset: http://compmusic.upf.edu/carnatic-rhythm-dataset

Hindustani dataset: http://compmusic.upf.edu/hindustani-rhythm-dataset

Code

An open source MATLAB implementation of the bar pointer model is available for research purposes

https://github.com/flokadillo/bayesbeat

Please contact us at the email address below if you want access to the data repository.

Ajay Srinivasamurthy
Music Technology Group
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 
Barcelona, Spain