Tracking metrical structure changes with sparse-NMF

Abstract

The estimation of rhythmic properties such as tempo, beat positions or metrical structure are central aspects of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research. Meter inference algorithms are typically designed to track metrical structure in presence of mild deviations of the feature estimates over time in order to account for performance imprecisions, expressive timing or musical effects such as accelerando. Abrupt changes of metrical structure over time are comparatively rarely addressed. In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach to detect metrical structure changes. Formulating the problem as a metrical structure based segmentation retrieval task, we present a variant of sparse NMF and compare it to existing methods. For evaluation, we introduce a new dataset of music recordings containing metric modulations with the corresponding annotations.