Automatic music transcription using low rank non-negative matrix decomposition

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) is concerned with the problem of producing the pitch content of a piece of music given a recorded signal. Many methods rely on sparse or low rank models, where the observed magnitude spectra are represented as a linear combination of dictionary atoms corresponding to individual pitches. Some of the most successful approaches use Non-negative Matrix Decomposition (NMD) or Factorization (NMF), which can be used to learn a dictionary and pitch activation matrix from a given signal. Here we introduce a further refinement of NMD in which we assume the transcription itself is approximately low rank. The intuition behind this approach is that the total number of distinct activation patterns should be relatively small since the pitch content between adjacent frames should be similar. A rank penalty is introduced into the NMD objective function and solved using an iterative algorithm based on Singular Value thresholding. We find that the low rank assumption leads to a significant increase in performance compared to NMD using β-divergence on a standard AMT dataset.