Proceedings of the 1995 International Computer Music Conference
A Real-time Beat Tracking System for Audio Signals / Masataka Goto and Yoichi Muraoka

A Real-time Beat Tracking System for Audio Signals

Masataka Goto and Yoichi Muraoka

School of Science and Engineering, Waseda University
3-4-1 Ohkubo Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169, JAPAN.
+81-3-3209-5198 / {goto, muraoka}@muraoka.info.waseda.ac.jp

ABSTRACT:
This paper presents a beat tracking system that processes musical acoustic signals and recognizes temporal positions of beats in real time. Most previous systems were not able to deal with audio signals that contained sounds of various instruments, especially drums. Our system deals with popular music in which drums maintain the beat. To examine multiple hypotheses of beats in parallel, our system manages multiple agents that predict beats by using autocorrelation and cross-correlation according to different strategies. In our experiment with eight pre-registered drum patterns, the system implemented on a parallel computer correctly tracked beats in 42 out of 44 commercially distributed popular songs.

1. Introduction
2. System Description
   2.1 Frequency Analysis
   
   2.1.1 Extracting onset components / Extracting noise components
   2.1.2 Onset-time finders
   2.1.3 Drum-sound finder
   
   2.2 Beat Prediction
   
   2.2.1 Predicting next beat
   2.2.2 Inferring beat type
   2.2.3 Managing hypotheses
   
3. Experiments and Results
4. Conclusion
5. References

• Masataka Goto's Home Page
• A Real-time Beat Tracking System for Musical Acoustic Signals
  (including the postscript version of this paper)