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Main Authors: Yeung, Michael, Toyama, Keisuke, Teramoto, Toya, Takahashi, Shusuke, Kojima, Tamaki
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21739
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author Yeung, Michael
Toyama, Keisuke
Teramoto, Toya
Takahashi, Shusuke
Kojima, Tamaki
author_facet Yeung, Michael
Toyama, Keisuke
Teramoto, Toya
Takahashi, Shusuke
Kojima, Tamaki
contents Automatic drum transcription (ADT) is traditionally formulated as a discriminative task to predict drum events from audio spectrograms. In this work, we redefine ADT as a conditional generative task and introduce Noise-to-Notes (N2N), a framework leveraging diffusion modeling to transform audio-conditioned Gaussian noise into drum events with associated velocities. This generative diffusion approach offers distinct advantages, including a flexible speed-accuracy trade-off and strong inpainting capabilities. However, the generation of binary onset and continuous velocity values presents a challenge for diffusion models, and to overcome this, we introduce an Annealed Pseudo-Huber loss to facilitate effective joint optimization. Finally, to augment low-level spectrogram features, we propose incorporating features extracted from music foundation models (MFMs), which capture high-level semantic information and enhance robustness to out-of-domain drum audio. Experimental results demonstrate that including MFM features significantly improves robustness and N2N establishes a new state-of-the-art performance across multiple ADT benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21739
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Noise-to-Notes: Diffusion-based Generation and Refinement for Automatic Drum Transcription
Yeung, Michael
Toyama, Keisuke
Teramoto, Toya
Takahashi, Shusuke
Kojima, Tamaki
Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
Automatic drum transcription (ADT) is traditionally formulated as a discriminative task to predict drum events from audio spectrograms. In this work, we redefine ADT as a conditional generative task and introduce Noise-to-Notes (N2N), a framework leveraging diffusion modeling to transform audio-conditioned Gaussian noise into drum events with associated velocities. This generative diffusion approach offers distinct advantages, including a flexible speed-accuracy trade-off and strong inpainting capabilities. However, the generation of binary onset and continuous velocity values presents a challenge for diffusion models, and to overcome this, we introduce an Annealed Pseudo-Huber loss to facilitate effective joint optimization. Finally, to augment low-level spectrogram features, we propose incorporating features extracted from music foundation models (MFMs), which capture high-level semantic information and enhance robustness to out-of-domain drum audio. Experimental results demonstrate that including MFM features significantly improves robustness and N2N establishes a new state-of-the-art performance across multiple ADT benchmarks.
title Noise-to-Notes: Diffusion-based Generation and Refinement for Automatic Drum Transcription
topic Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21739