Novel audio features for capturing tempo salience in music recordings

In music compositions, certain parts may be played in an improvisational style with a rather vague notion of tempo, while other parts are characterized by having a clearly perceivable tempo. Based on this observation, we introduce in this paper some novel audio features for capturing tempo-related information. Rather than measuring the specific tempo of a local section of a given recording, our objective is to capture the existence or absence of a notion of tempo, a kind of tempo salience. By a quantitative analysis within an Indian music scenario, we demonstrate that our audio features capture the aspect of tempo salience well, while being independent of continuous fluctuations and local changes in tempo.