Pairing Real-Time Piano Transcription with Symbol-level Tracking for Precise and Robust Score Following

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Peter, Silvan, Hu, Patricia, Widmer, Gerhard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Peter, Silvan
Hu, Patricia
Widmer, Gerhard
author_facet Peter, Silvan
Hu, Patricia
Widmer, Gerhard
contents Real-time music tracking systems follow a musical performance and at any time report the current position in a corresponding score. Most existing methods approach this problem exclusively in the audio domain, typically using online time warping (OLTW) techniques on incoming audio and an audio representation of the score. Audio OLTW techniques have seen incremental improvements both in features and model heuristics which reached a performance plateau in the past ten years. We argue that converting and representing the performance in the symbolic domain -- thereby transforming music tracking into a symbolic task -- can be a more effective approach, even when the domain transformation is imperfect. Our music tracking system combines two real-time components: one handling audio-to-note transcription and the other a novel symbol-level tracker between transcribed input and score. We compare the performance of this mixed audio-symbolic approach with its equivalent audio-only counterpart, and demonstrate that our method outperforms the latter in terms of both precision, i.e., absolute tracking error, and robustness, i.e., tracking success.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pairing Real-Time Piano Transcription with Symbol-level Tracking for Precise and Robust Score Following
Peter, Silvan
Hu, Patricia
Widmer, Gerhard
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Real-time music tracking systems follow a musical performance and at any time report the current position in a corresponding score. Most existing methods approach this problem exclusively in the audio domain, typically using online time warping (OLTW) techniques on incoming audio and an audio representation of the score. Audio OLTW techniques have seen incremental improvements both in features and model heuristics which reached a performance plateau in the past ten years. We argue that converting and representing the performance in the symbolic domain -- thereby transforming music tracking into a symbolic task -- can be a more effective approach, even when the domain transformation is imperfect. Our music tracking system combines two real-time components: one handling audio-to-note transcription and the other a novel symbol-level tracker between transcribed input and score. We compare the performance of this mixed audio-symbolic approach with its equivalent audio-only counterpart, and demonstrate that our method outperforms the latter in terms of both precision, i.e., absolute tracking error, and robustness, i.e., tracking success.
title Pairing Real-Time Piano Transcription with Symbol-level Tracking for Precise and Robust Score Following
topic Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05078