VioPTT: Violin Technique-Aware Transcription from Synthetic Data Augmentation

Abstract

While automatic music transcription is well-established in music information retrieval, most models are limited to transcribing pitch and timing information from audio, and thus omit crucial expressive and instrument-specific nuances. One example is playing technique on the violin, which affords its distinct palette of timbres for maximal emotional impact. Here, we propose VioPTT (Violin Playing Technique-aware Transcription), a lightweight cascade model that directly transcribes violin playing technique in addition to pitch onset and offset. Furthermore, we release MOSA-VPT, a novel, high-quality synthetic violin playing technique dataset to circumvent the need for manually labeled annotations. Leveraging this dataset, our model demonstrated strong generalization to real-world note-level violin technique recordings in addition to achieving state-of-the-art transcription performance. To our knowledge, VioPTT is the first to jointly combine violin transcription and playing technique prediction within a unified framework.