Improved Perceptual Tempo Detection of Music

Perceptual tempo refers to listener's tempo perception how fast the music goes, when he listens to a piece of music with fairly constant overall tempo. Existing work on automatically determining the tempo of a piece of music is usually not able to determine the Perceptual tempo. Therefore, our previous work on the Perceptual Tempo Estimator (PTE) improved on existing work and experimental results had shown its effectiveness in determining the perceptual tempo than the existing work. However there are music pieces that have overall uniform perceived tempo, but have some small parts (segments) with quite different tempo from other parts. The PTE may not work well for this type of music pieces if the energy level in these small segments is significantly high. In this paper, we propose an improved PTE (IPTE) to provide better tempo determination. Experimental results show that IPTE is more effective in determining the Perceptual tempo of the music signal with constant perceived tempo.