Abstract

: Identifying the temporal location of downbeats is a fundamental musical skill. Observing that previous attempts to automate this process are constrained to hold a single current notion of beat timing and placement, we find that they will fail to predict beats and not recover beyond the point at which the first mistake is made. We propose a new model that uses beam search to consider multiple interpretations of the performance. At any time, predictions of beat timing and placement are made according to the most credible of many interpretations under consideration. Introduction. Identifying the temporal location of downbeats is a fundamental musical skill. Even musically untrained humans can tap their foot with the beat when they hear a musical performance. Humans generally perform this task with ease and precision even in the face of unusual rhythms, musical expressiveness, and imprecise performances. A fully general, automatic beat tracker would be of great value in many task...

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