Towards Automated Extraction of Tempo Parameters from Expressive Music Recordings

A performance of a piece of music heavily depends on the musician’s or conductor’s individual vision and personal interpretation of the given musical score. As basis for the analysis of artistic idiosyncrasies, one requires accurate annotations that reveal the exact timing and intensity of the various note events occurring in the performances. In the case of audio recordings, this annotation is often done manually, which is prohibitive in view of large music collections. In this paper, we present a fully automatic approach for extracting temporal information from a music recording using score-audio synchronization techniques. This information is given in the form of a tempo curve that reveals the relative tempo difference between an actual performance and some reference representation of the underlying musical piece. As shown by our experiments on harmony-based Western music, our approach allows for capturing the overall tempo flow and for certain classes of music even finer expressive tempo nuances.