Cemgil, T., Kappen, B., Desain, P., and Honing, H. (2001) On tempo tracking: Tempogram Representation and Kalman filtering. Journal of New Music Research. 29 (4), 259-273.

Abstract

We formulate tempo tracking in a Bayesian framework where a tempo tracker is modeled as a stochastic dynamical system. The tempo is modeled as a hidden state variable of the system and is estimated by a Kalman filter. The Kalman filter operates on a Tempogram, a wavelet-like multiscale expansion of a real performance. An important advantage of our approach is that it is possible to formulate both off-line or real-time algorithms. The simulation results on a systematically collected set of MIDI piano performances of Yesterday and Michelle by the Beatles shows accurate tracking of approximately 90% of the beats.

Full paper (pdf)

Beatles data-set (.zip)