Predicting Agreement and Disagreement in the Perception of Tempo

In the absence of a music score, tempo can only be defined in terms of its perception. Thus recent studies have focused on the estimation of perceptual tempo such as defined by listening experiments. So far, algorithms have been proposed to estimate the tempo when people agree on it. In this paper, we study the case when people disagree on the perception of tempo and propose an algorithm to predict this disagreement. For this, we hypothesize that the perception of tempo is correlated to a set of variations of various viewpoints on the audio content: energy, harmony, spectral-balance variations and short-term-similarity-rate. We hypothesize that when those variations are coherent a shared perception of tempo is favoured and when they are not, people may perceive different tempi. We then propose various statistical models to predict the agreement or disagreement in the perception of tempo from these audio features. Finally, we evaluate the models using a test-set resulting from the perceptual experiment performed at Last-FM in 2011.