Toward Automated Holistic Beat Tracking, Music Analysis, and Understanding

Most music processing attempts to focus on one particular feature or structural element such as pitch, beat location, tempo, or genre. This hierarchical approach, in which music is separated into elements that are analyzed independently, is convenient for the scientific researcher, but is at odds with intuition about music perception. Music is interconnected at many levels, and the interplay of melody, harmony, and rhythm are important in perception. As a first step toward more holistic music analysis, music structure is used to constrain a beat tracking program. With structural information, the simple beat tracker, working with audio input, shows a large improvement. The implications of this work for other music analysis problems are discussed.