Discrimination Between Ascending/Descending Pitch Arpeggios
Isabel Barbancho, George Tzanetakis, Ana Maria Barbancho, Lorenzo J. Tardón · IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing · 2018
Automatic music transcription can be defined as the analysis of the acoustic signal to extract a symbolic representation of music. Existing transcription systems typically consider just the notes played at a given moment; however, other aspects such as expressiveness and playing technique can also be considered. This work is focused on how chords are played. Specifically, we consider a special type of chords, those played in arpeggio style, or simply arpeggios, in which the notes are played fast, sequentially from the lowest to the highest pitched note or vice versa and with a large overlap of the notes' sound. The main goal of this paper is to determine the pitch direction in which the arpeggiated chord was played. Two different classification methods are considered: a Fisher linear discriminant and an SVM linear classification scheme. Different features are presented for this task: one is based on the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and two others, specifically designed for this task, rely on different analyses of the spectrogram. Evaluations have been done with a wide number of musical instruments. The results show that the pitch direction can be reliably detected using the proposed methods.