Simultaneous beat and downbeat-tracking using a probabilistic framework : theory and large-scale evaluation

Geoffroy Peeters (1) , Hélène Papadopoulos (1)

1 IRCAM - Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique

This paper deals with the simultaneous estimation beat and downbeat location in an audio-file. We propose a probabilistic framework in which the time of the beats and their associated beat-positions-inside-a-measure role, hence the downbeats, are considered as hidden states and are estimated simultaneously using signal observations. For this, we propose a "reverse" Viterbi algorithm which decodes hidden states over beat-numbers. A beat-template is used to derive the beat observation probabilities. For this task, we propose the use of a machine-learning method, the Linear Discriminant Analysis, to estimate the most discriminative beat-templates. We propose two observations to derive the beat-position-inside-a-measure observation probability: the variation over time of chroma vectors and the spectral balance. We then perform a large-scale evaluation of beat and downbeat-tracking using six test-sets. In this, we study the influence of the various parameters of our method, compare this method to our previous beat and downbeat- tracking algorithms, and compare our results to state-of-the-art results on two test-sets for which results have been published. We finally discuss the results obtained by our system in the MIREX- 09 contest for which our system ranked first for the "McKinney Collection" test-set.

Mots clés: Linear Discriminant Analysis; hidden Markov model; reverse Viterbi decoding.; reverse Viterbi decoding; Beat-tracking; Downbeat; Beat-templates

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Geoffroy Peeters, Hélène Papadopoulos. Simultaneous beat and downbeat-tracking using a probabilistic framework : theory and large-scale evaluation. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2011, 19 (6), pp.Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TASL.2010.2098869. ⟨hal-00655779v1⟩