Rhythm transcription of MIDI performances based on hierarchical Bayesian modelling of repetition and modification of musical note patterns
Eita Nakamura, Katsutoshi Itoyama, Kazuyoshi Yoshii · 2016
This paper presents a method of rhythm transcription (i.e., automatic recognition of note values in music performance signals) based on a Bayesian music language model that describes the repetitive structure of musical notes. Conventionally, music language models for music transcription are trained with a dataset of musical pieces. Because typical musical pieces have repetitions consisting of a limited number of note patterns, better models fitting individual pieces could be obtained by inducing compact grammars. The main challenges are inducing appropriate grammar for a score that is observed indirectly through a performance and capturing incomplete repetitions, which can be represented as repetitions with modifications. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model in which the generation of a language model is described with a Dirichlet process and the production of musical notes is described with a hierarchical hidden Markov model (HMM) that incorporates the process of modifying note patterns. We derive an efficient algorithm based on Gibbs sampling for simultaneously inferring from a performance signal the score and the individual language model behind it. Evaluations showed that the proposed model outperformed previously studied HMM-based models.