Music meter and tempo tracking from raw polyphonic audio

This paper presents a method for the extraction of music meter and tempo from raw polyphonic audio recordings, assuming that music meter remains constant throughout the recoding. Although this assumption can be restrictive for certain musical genres, it is acceptable for a large corpus of folklore eastern music styles, including Greek traditional dance music. Our approach is based on the selfsimilarity analysis of the audio recording and does not assume the presence of percussive instruments. Its novelty lies in the fact that music meter and tempo are jointly determined. The method has been applied to a variety of musical genres, in the context of Greek traditional music where music meter can be 24 , 3 4 , 4 4 , 5 4 , 7 8 , 9 8 , 12 8 and tempo ranges from 40bpm to 330bpm. Experiments have, so far, demonstrated the efficiency of our method (music meter and tempo were successfully extracted for over 95% of the recordings).