Research Seminars

Simultaneous estimation of chords, key and downbeats from an audio file

Hélène Papadopoulos

Wednesday 14th May 2008, 16:00, Room CS338 (Computer Science Department)

Abstract

Musical signals are highly structured in terms of harmony and rhythm. A new method for simultaneously estimating the chord progression, the musical key and the downbeats from an audio file is presented. For this, a specific topology of hidden Markov models that allows to model chord dependency on metrical structure and on musical key is proposed. Integrating knowledge about mutual dependencies between chords, key and metrical structure allows to enhance the estimation of these musical attributes. The model is evaluated on a dataset of 62 popular music songs from the Beatles.