Music Tempo Estimation Using Sub-Band Synchrony

Tempo estimation aims at estimating the pace of a musical piece measured in beats per minute. This paper presents a new tempo estimation method that utilizes coherent energy changes across multiple frequency sub-bands to identify the onsets. A new measure, called the sub-band synchrony, is proposed to detect and quantify the coherent amplitude changes across multiple sub-bands. Given a musical piece, our method first detects the onsets using the sub-band synchrony measure. The periodicity of the resulting onset curve, measured using the autocorrelation function, is used to estimate the tempo value. The performance of the sub-band synchrony based tempo estimation method is evaluated on two music databases. Experimental results indicate a reasonable improvement in performance when compared to conventional methods of tempo estimation.