Tracking beats and microtiming in Afro-Latin American music using conditional random fields and deep learning

Abstract

Events in music frequently exhibit small-scale temporal deviations (microtiming), with respect to the underlying regular metrical grid. In some cases, as in music from the Afro-Latin American tradition, such deviations appear systematically, disclosing their structural importance in rhythmic and stylistic configuration. In this work we explore the idea of automatically and jointly tracking beats and microtiming in timekeeper instruments of Afro-Latin American music, in particular Brazilian samba and Uruguayan candombe. To that end, we propose a language model based on conditional random fields that integrates beat and onset likelihoods as observations. We derive those activations using deep neural networks and evaluate its performance on manually annotated data using a scheme adapted to this task. We assess our approach in controlled conditions suitable for these timekeeper instruments, and study the microtiming profiles’ dependency on genre and performer, illustrating promising aspects of this technique towards a more comprehensive understanding of these music traditions.