A Novel Method for Tempo Detection of INDIC Tala-s

Perceived tempo for tablaa accompaniment in a composition, is an important parameter to represent and transcript the rhythmic pattern of a composition, in the context of Indian classical music. If such parameters can be detected then it enables organized archiving and retrieval of rhythm data in Music Information Retrieval system. A simple and novel methodology for detecting tempo is presented in this paper. This method is based on the extraction of beat/stroke/bol duration for any theka of INDIC tala-s, rendered with single, composite or absent strokes. Analysis and experiment with number of audio clips of tablaa signal for various tala, tempo and rendering, illustrates the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methodology.