On the use of the tempogram to describe audio content and its application to Music structural segmentation

This paper presents a new set of audio features to describe music content based on tempo cues. Tempogram, a mid-level representation of tempo information, is constructed to characterize tempo variation and local pulse in the audio signal. We introduce a collection of novel tempogram-based features inspired by musicological hypotheses about the relation between music structure and its rhythmic components prominent at different metrical levels. The strength of these features is demonstrated in music structural segmentation, an important task in Music information retrieval (MIR), using several published popular music datasets. Results indicate that incorporating tempo information into audio segmentation is a promising new direction.