MIREX 2006 Audio Beat Tracking Evaluation: BeatRoot
Simon Dixon · 2006
BeatRoot is an interactive beat tracking system which has been used for several years in studies of performance timing. In this new version, some of the weaknesses of the original system have been addressed. The original simple onset detection algorithm, which caused problems for beat tracking music without prominent drums, has been replaced with a more robust onset detector. Several new features have been added, such as annotation of multiple metrical levels and phrase boundaries, and improvements in the user interface. Also, the new version has been written entirely in Java, so that it runs on all major platforms. The beat tracking algorithm remains largely unchanged: BeatRoot uses a multiple agent architecture which simultaneously considers several different hypotheses concerning the rate and placement of musical beats, resulting in accurate tracking of the beat, quick recovery from errors, and graceful degradation in cases where the beat is only weakly implied by the data.