Analysis of the meter of acoustic musical signals

A method is described which analyzes the basic pattern of beats in a piece of music, the musical meter. The analysis is performed jointly at three different time scales: at the temporally atomic tatum pulse level, at the tactus pulse level which corresponds to the tempo of a piece, and at the musical measure level. Acoustic signals from arbitrary musical genres are considered. For the initial time-frequency analysis, a new technique is proposed which measures the degree of musical accent as a function of time at four different frequency ranges. This is followed by a bank of comb filter resonators which extracts features for estimating the periods and phases of the three pulses. The features are processed by a probabilistic model which represents primitive musical knowledge and uses the low-level observations to perform joint estimation of the tatum, tactus, and measure pulses. The model takes into account the temporal dependencies between successive estimates and enables both causal and noncausal analysis. The method is validated using a manually annotated database of 474 music signals from various genres. The method works robustly for different types of music and improves over two state-of-the-art reference methods in simulations.