EN3550

Automatic Beat
Detection System
Mini project
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3

Beat detection............................................................................................................................................... 4

filterbank ................................................................................................................................................... 6

Fast fourior transform ........................................................................................................................... 6

Smoothing ................................................................................................................................................. 6

Hanning window ................................................................................................................................... 7

Rectification .............................................................................................................................................. 7

Comb filterbank ........................................................................................................................................ 7

Autocorrelation ..................................................................................................................................... 7

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 8

References .................................................................................................................................................... 8

Appendix(matlab code)................................................................................................................................. 8
Introduction
The beat is the basic time unit of music, the pulse of the sensual level, also known as
the beat level, it often connects with the tempo of a piece or a particular sequence of
individual beats, in some kind of music such as hip hop and rhythm and blue (R&B) music,
the term beat commonly refers to the entire instrumental, non-vocal layer of the song and
it is underlying in the song, which is frequently based on a looped recording of a drum-
rhythm. It may also refer to particular beats in the measure. Much music is characterized
by a sequence of stressed and unstressed beats (often called "strong" and "weak")
organized into measures and perhaps indicated by a time signature and tempo indication
of a music signal. Basically beat consist from downbeat and upbeat

The downbeat is the impulse that occurs at the beginning of a bar in measured music. Its
name derives from the downward stroke of the director or conductor's baton at the start of
each measure. It frequently carries the strongest accent of the rhythmic cycle. Upbeat is An
unaccented beat or beats that occur before the first beat of the following measure. In other
words, this is an impulse in a measured rhythm that immediately precedes, and hence
anticipates, the downbeat. It can be the last beat in a bar where that bar precedes a new bar
of music.

Beat extraction of a music or bio medical signal means for detecting a change in a portion of
a power spectrum in a spectrogram of an input signal, the change having a magnitude
greatest among other changes determined for adjacent portions of the power spectrum,
and for outputting a detection output signal that is the beat of the given music signal. It is
called by beat and can be measured by beat per minute (bpm) synchronized in time to the
changing portion in synchronization with the input music signal. Tempo value estimation
means for detecting a self-correlation of the detection output signal from the beat.
information of the attribute information obtaining means in synchronization with the beat
synchronization signal from the beat synchronization signal generation and output means,
for generating display information to be displayed on a display screen in synchronization
with the playback of the input music signal on the basis of the piece-of-music composition
information, and for outputting the display information to display means. The main focus is
on the Beat Strength of a, music signal, which will be loosely defined as one rhythmic
characteristic that could allow to discriminate between two pieces of music having the
same tempo. Using this definition, we might say that a piece of Hard Rock has a higher beat
strength than a piece of Classical Music at the same tempo. Characteristics related to Beat
Strength have been implicitly used in automatic beat detection algorithms and shown to be
as important as tempo information for music classification and retrieval. In the work
presented in this paper, a user study exploring the perception of Beat Strength was
conducted and the results were used to calibrate and explore automatic Beat Strength
measures based on the calculation of Beat Histograms.
Musical beat tracking or identifying is important for various multimedia applications.
These systems recognize temporal positions of quarter notes, just as people keep time to
music by hand-clapping or foot-tapping. Such a system is needed by applications, for
example, video editing systems, in which a visual track can be automatically synchronized
with an audio track using beat tracking. In particular, it facilitates the editing of music
promotion videos
Since visual motions are synchronized with beats. In an audio editing system or hard disk
recording system, beat tracking makes automatic indexing of music possible. The users of
these systems can deal with acoustic signals as a set of beats instead of raw acoustic wave
data. In live performances, furthermore, beat tracking is useful in the control of stage
lighting by a computer. For instance, various properties of lighting such as color,
brightness, direction, and effect can be changed in time to the music.
Instead of application in music and entertainment industry, it is possible to use the beat
identification system in bio medical application too because the heart beat and pulse can be
detected with the suitable equipment and can be used with real time monitoring system for
medical diagnosis.

Beat detection
It is basically amounts to emphasizing the sudden impulses of sound in the song and then
finding the fundamental period at which these impulses appear. This is done by breaking
the signal into frequency bands, extracting the envelope of these frequency-banded signals,
differentiating them to emphasize sudden changes in sound, and running the signals
through a comb-filterbank and choosing the highest energy result as our tempo. Our
algorithm does not account for the possibility of a varying tempo in a piece of music. It
extracts 2.2 seconds of music from the middle of a song, tempo-analyzes it, and assumes
that the tempo found is associated with the entire piece of music. The sample length, 2.2
seconds, is the minimal amount of information we can work with to have at least two beats
for the slowest tempo we are allowing for, 60 bpm. We are choosing 2.2 seconds rather
than 2 seconds to ensure that the tempo-choosing processing does not exaggerate the
energy of 60 bpm. A two second sample could have its beginning and end perceived as
beats by a 60bpm search process. Since 60bpm is our lowest search tempo, any sample
longer than two seconds works fine in our system.

Input Frequency range filterbank

Envelop extractor Envelop extractor Envelop extractor

Differentiator Differentiator Differentiator

Half wave rectifier Half wave rectifier Half wave rectifier

Comb filterbank Comb filterbank Comb filterbank

Energy spectrum Energy spectrum Energy spectrum Energy spectrum

∑ ∑

Identification of peaks
Filterbank
The signal is divided up into six separate signals, each consisting of the frequency content
of the original signal from a certain range. This is because of it has the general effect of
separating "notes" from different instrument groups and allowing them to be analyzed
separately. Tempo-analyzing the original signal could be consist from lots of errors due to
conflicting downbeats of different instruments. This separation is performed by taking the
FFT of the signal and then taking appropriate sized chunks of the FFT and assigning them
to their frequency bands. (Chunk length is dependent on both the sampling frequency and
the signal length.) We chose to follow the method outlined in Scheirer, 1998 and broke our
signal into the bands 0-200Hz, 200-400Hz, 400-800Hz, 800-1600Hz, 1600-3200Hz, and
finally 3200Hz-Sampling Frequency. This gave us a total of six bands to work with. The
inverse FFT of these signals is taken and their time domain representation is sent to the
smoothing function.

Fast fourior transform

Should write smtin on fft

Smoothing
Since we are only looking for the tempo of our signal, we need to reduce it to a form where
we can see sudden changes in sound. This is done by reducing the signal down to its
envelope, which can be thought of as the overall trend in sound amplitude, not the
frequencies it carries. Essentially, we take each of our six frequency-banded signals and low
pass filter them. To accomplish this we first full-wave rectified our signals in order to
decrease high-frequency content and so that we would only have to deal with the positive
side of the envelope we were searching for. We then convolved each of our signals by the
right half of a Hanning window with a length of .4 seconds. Again, we chose to do this
operation in the by transforming to the frequency domain, multiplying, and inverse
transforming to decrease computation time. The resulting plots of the frequency-banded
signals definitely correspond to the envelopes of the original signals.
Hanning window
Should write smtin on hanning

Rectification
Now that we have the signals in an envelope form, we can simply differentiate them to
accentuate when the sound amplitude changes. The largest changes should correspond to
beats since the beat is just a periodic emphasis of sound. The six frequency-banded signals
are differentiated in time and then half-wave rectified so we can only see increases in
sound. The signals are now ready to be tempo-analyzed.

Comb filterbank
This is the most computationally intensive step. We need to convolve the differentiated
frequency-banded signals with various comb filters to determine which yields the highest
energy. A comb filter is basically a series of impulses that occur periodically, at the tempo
you specify. Convolving a comb filter with a total of three impulses with our signal should
give an output that has a higher energy when the tempo of the comb filter is close to a
multiple of that of the song. This is because the convolving with the three impulse comb
filter just results in an output vector made up of an echoed version of our original signal.
This echoed output will have a higher energy if the tempo of the signal and comb filter
match because it will result in there being higher peaks (overlap from echo) in the output .

We implemented the comb filter by specifying a range of tempos we wanted to search for
and the resolution or spacing between them. This established a set of comb filters to
convolve with our signal. The FFT of each frequency-banded signal was multiplied by the
FFT of each comb filter and the energy of each of these was taken. Then the energies of the
frequency-bands were summed so that we were left with a vector of energies of tempos.
This output takes the form of a peak at the fundamental tempo of the song followed by
smaller, wider peaks at multiples of this tempo. We then choose the maximum value of
these energies to be the fundamental tempo of our piece.

Autocorrelation
Should write smtin on auto
Conclusion
There are cases for which the algorithm does not pick out a reasonable tempo and these
are typically songs with a weak tempo that rely more on phrasing from the music to convey
a tempo. From these results, our process could have benefitted from longer samples.
However, this would have taken much longer to process so we could also streamline our
algorithm to run in real-time in a language faster than Matlab.

Write smtin

References

Appendix(matlab code)