A Beat Tracking Approach to Complete Description of Rhythm in Indian Classical Music

Ajay Srinivasamurthy, Sidharth Subramanian, Gregoire Tronel, Parag Chordia · 2012

In this paper, we propose a beat tracking and beat similarity based approach to rhythm description in Indian Classical Music. We present an algorithm that uses a beat similarity matrix and inter onset interval histogram to automatically extract the sub-beat structure and the long-term periodicity of a musical piece. From this information, we can then obtain a rank ordered set of candidates for the tāla cycle period and the naḍe (sub-beat structure). e tempo, beat locations along with the tāla and naḍe candidates provide a beer overall rhythm description of the musical piece. e algorithm is tested on a manually annotated Carnatic music dataset (CMDB) and Indian light classical music dataset (ILCMDB). e allowed metrical levels recognition accuracy of the algorithm on ILCMDB is 79.3% and 72.4% for the sub-beat structure and the tāla, respectively. e accuracy on the difficult CMDB was poorer with 68.6% and 51.1% for naḍe and tāla, respectively. e analysis of the algorithm's performance motivates us to explore knowledge based approaches to tāla recognition.

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