TEMPO INDUCTION BY INVESTIGATING THE METRICAL STRUCTURE OF MUSIC USING A PERIODICITY SIGNAL THAT RELATES TO THE TATUM PERIOD

The estimation of the musical tempo of audio signals is of large interest for various applications, e.g. the synchronization of multi-media content to music and music information retrieval systems. This article describes the author’s contribution to the 2 Annual Music Information Retrieval Evaluation Exchange (MIREX 2005) and gives an evaluation and comparison of the recognition performance. The presented method computes a representation of the metrical structure of a musical piece as a function of the degree of periodicity of a phenomenal accent signal at lags that relate to the period of the fastest pulse. This representation is compared to pre-defined metric templates, corresponding to various time signatures and metrical structures. A list of tempo hypotheses is obtained from the best fitting template, from which the tempo is chosen with respect to their salience and apriori probabilities of tempo values.