Beat Tracking by Dynamic Programming.

Given an audio file, the beat tracker uses a dynamic programming algorithm to compute an estimated sequence of beat times[1].

The system is made up of three distinct phases.

• First, perceptually weighted spectral flux analysis extracts an onset strength envelope (OSE) from an audio file.

• This OSE is then used to estimate a tempo period for the audio via a perceptually weighted auto-correlation.

• Finally, a dynamic programming algorithm is used to identify the most likely sequence of beats based on the OSE and estimated tempo period.

The system was evaluated using a mean f-measure score across ~700 Ballroom dance music recordings.

• Find the audio dataset here.
• Find the associated beat annotations here.

Due to Dynamic Programming, this algorithm is particularly efficient and can process and evaluate performance on the full Ballroom dance dataset in ~2-3 minutes.

[1] D. P. W. Ellis, ‘Beat Tracking by Dynamic Programming’, Journal of New Music Research, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 51–60, Mar. 2007.