Tempo tracking and rhythm quantization by sequential Monte Carlo

We present a probabilistic generative model for timing deviations in expressive music performance. The structure of the proposed model is equivalent to a switching state space model. We formulate two well known music recognition problems, namely tempo tracking and automatic transcription (rhythm quantization) as filtering and maximum a posteriori (MAP) state estimation tasks. The inferences are carried out using sequential Monte Carlo integration (particle filtering) techniques. For this purpose, we have derived a novel Viterbi algorithm for Rao-Blackwellized particle filters, where a subset of the hidden variables is integrated out. The resulting model is suitable for realtime tempo tracking and transcription and hence useful in a number of music applications such as adaptive automatic accompaniment and score typesetting.