Meter detection from audio for Indian music

Abstract

The meter of a musical excerpt provides high-level rhythmic information and is valuable in many music information retrieval tasks. We investigate the use of a computationally efficient approach to metrical analysis based on psycho-acoustically motivated decomposition of the audio signal. A two-stage comb filter-based approach, originally proposed for double/ triple meter estimation, is extended to a septuple meter (such as 7/8 time-signature) and its performance evaluated on a sizable Indian music database. We find that this system works well for Indian music and the distribution of musical stress/accents across a temporal grid can be utilized to obtain the metrical structure of audio automatically. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.