2022/05/29 by Yun-Ning Hung, Hung, Yun-Ning, Ju-Chiang Wang +7 · 5 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music Technology and Sound Studies #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.14701
openalex publication_date 2022/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Transformer is a successful deep neural network (DNN) architecture that has shown its versatility not only in natural language processing but also in music information retrieval (MIR). In this paper, we present a novel Transformer-based approach to tackle beat and downbeat tracking. This approach employs SpecTNT (Spectral-Temporal Transformer in Transformer), a variant of Transformer that models both spectral and temporal dimensions of a time-frequency input of music audio. A SpecTNT model uses a stack of blocks, where each consists of two levels of Transformer encoders. The lower-level (or spectral) encoder handles the spectral features and enables the model to pay attention to harmonic components of each frame. Since downbeats indicate bar boundaries and are often accompanied by harmonic changes, this step may help downbeat modeling. The upper-level (or temporal) encoder aggregates useful local spectral information to pay attention to beat/downbeat positions. We also propose an architecture that combines SpecTNT with a state-of-the-art model, Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), to further improve the performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can significantly outperform TCN in downbeat tracking while maintaining comparable result in beat tracking.