Automatic Assessment of Timing and Rhythm in Electric Bass for Rock & Pop Repertoire
Colm Forkin · 2021
Music Education has undergone significant changes in the last twenty years, with a wide array of applications and online tools emerging to help students learn an instrument autonomously offering automatic feedback. Timing and rhythm are crucial in playing good quality electric bass and although tools exist that help measure their synchronization with the metronome, they don’t provide feedback on note length. My experience in having prepared for electric bass music exams and the identification of shortcomings in performance assessment tools have been the motivation of this thesis. Note length and note rests are two missing measurement criteria in the state-of-the-art tools. The algorithms and technology exist to do this, but their application has been in automatic music transcription where precision requirements are not as high as they are for music education. This thesis evaluates algorithms for onset and offset detection, offers some new suggestions and tests them on songs with different musical properties on the Rock and Pop (R&P) repertoire.