Simultaneous estimation of chord progression and downbeats from an audio file

Harmony and metrical structure are some of the most important attributes of Western tonal music. In this paper, we present a new method for simultaneously estimating the chord progression and the downbeats from an audio file. For this, we propose a specific topology of hidden Markov models that allows us to model chords dependency on metrical structure. The model is evaluated on a dataset of 66 popular music songs from the Beatles and shows improvement over the state of the art.