Beat Tracking and Musical Metre Analysis

Abstract

Imagine you are sitting in a bar and your favourite song is played on the jukebox. It is quite possible that you might start tapping your foot in time to the music. This is the essence of beat tracking and it is a quite automatic and subconscious task for most humans. Unfortunately, the same is not true for computers; replicating this process algorithmically has been an active area of research for well over twenty years, with reasonable success achieved only recently.