Learning Hierarchical Metrical Structure Beyond Measures

Music contains hierarchical structures beyond beats and measures. While hierarchical structure annotations are helpful for music information retrieval and computer musicology, such annotations are scarce in current digital music databases. In this paper, we explore a data-driven approach to automatically extract hierarchical metrical structures from scores. We propose a new model with a Temporal Convolutional Network-Conditional Random Field (TCN-CRF) architecture. Given a symbolic music score, our model takes in an arbitrary number of voices in a beat-quantized form, and predicts a 4-level hierarchical metrical structure from downbeat-level to section-level. We also annotate a dataset using RWC-POP MIDI files to facilitate training and evaluation. We show by experiments that the proposed method performs better than the rule-based approach under different orchestration settings. We also perform some simple musicological analysis on the model predictions. All demos, datasets and pre-trained models are publicly available on Github.
Comment: Accepted at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), 2022