Advantages of nonstationary gabor transforms in beat tacking

In this paper the potential of using nonstationary Gabor transform for beat tracking in music is examined. Nonstationary Gabor transforms are a generalization of the short-time Fourier transform, which allow flexibility in choosing the number of bins per octave, while retaining a perfect inverse transform. In this paper, it is evaluated if these properties can lead to an improved beat tracking in music signals, thus presenting an approach that introduces recent findings in mathematics to music information retrieval. For this, both nonstationary Gabor transforms and short-time Fourier transform are integrated into a simple beat tracking framework. Statistically significant improvements are observed on a large dataset, which motivates to integrate the nonstationary Gabor transform into state of the art approaches for beat tracking and tempo estimation.