Context-dependent beat tracking of musical audio

Abstract

We present a simple and efficient method for beat tracking of musical audio. With the aim of replicating the human ability of tapping in time to music, we formulate our approach using a two state model. The first state performs tempo induction and tracks tempo changes, while the second maintains contextual continuity within a single tempo hypothesis. Beat times are recovered by passing the output of an onset detection function through adaptively weighted comb filterbank matrices to separately identify the beat period and alignment. We evaluate our beat tracker both in terms of the accuracy of estimated beat locations and computational complexity. In a direct comparison with existing algorithms, we demonstrate equivalent performance at significantly reduced computational cost © 2006 IEEE.