REAL-TIME MUSIC TRACKING USING MULTIPLE PERFORMANCES AS A REFERENCE Andreas Arzt, Gerhard Widmer Department of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Vienna, Austria
[email protected] ABSTRACT e.g. [9, 19, 20]), is to start from a symbolic score represen- tation (e.g in the form of MIDI or MusicXML). Often, this In general, algorithms for real-time music tracking di- score representation is converted into a sound file using a rectly use a symbolic representation of the score, or a syn- software synthesizer. The result is a ‘machine-like’, low- thesised version thereof, as a reference for the on-line align- quality rendition of the piece, in which we know the time of ment process. In this paper we present an alternative ap- every event (e.g. note onsets). Then, a tracking algorithm proach. First, different performances of the piece in ques- is used to solve the problem of aligning the incoming live tion are collected and aligned (off-line) to the symbolic performance to this audio version of the score – thus, the score. Then, multiple instances of the on-line tracking al- problem of real-time music tracking can be treated as an gorithm (each using a different performance as a reference) on-line audio to audio alignment task. are used to follow the live performance, and their output is In this paper we follow a similar approach, but instead combined to come up with the current position in the score. of using the symbolic score directly, we propose to first As the evaluation shows, this strategy improves both the automatically align a recording of another performance of robustness and the precision, especially on pieces that are the same piece to the score.