Reliable tempo detection for structural segmentation in sarod concerts

Abstract

Tempo, or perceived speed, is an important characteristic of any music piece. In Hindustani instrumental music, different sections of a concert are characterised by the absence or presence of a regular rhythm and the speed of the music. In this paper, we analyse the tempo of concerts of a particular plucked-string instrument, the sarod. We first describe and evaluate different methods to detect plucks of sarod strings, as the timing pattern of the plucks, or note onsets, decides the tempo. We then use one such accurate method to track the tempo of a concert by analyzing the short-term periodicity of the onsets. Simultaneously, we also generate a measure of the salience of the periodicity to distinguish between rhythmic and non-rhythmic sections. We show that the tempo and salience vary significantly across sections in a concert, and thus, are valuable discriminative features in the task of automatic segmentation of sarod concerts.