Making the computer ‘‘listen’’ to music
Christopher S. Raphael · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2002
A computer system is discussed that provides real-time accompaniment to a live musician playing a non-improvisatory piece of music. Particular attention is devoted to the ‘‘listening’’ process, in which the computer must follow the soloist’s progress through the musical score by interpreting the sampled acoustic signal. The process is complicated by the significant variation and occasional errors from the live player during performance. A hidden Markov model is introduced providing a principled, trainable, and fast solution to the listening problem. The system is capable of assessing its own level of uncertainty about score position, as well as accommodating the sometimes strong signal component from the accompaniment instrument. A live demonstration will be provided.