Beat Tracking of Jazz Instruments : Performance of Beat Tracking Algorithms on Jazz Drums and Double-Bass

Sammanfattning: Beat tracking is a common research area within music information retrieval (MIR). Jazz is a musical genre that is commonly rich in rhythmical complexity, which makes beat tracking challenging. The aim of this study is to analyze how well beat tracking algorithms detect the beats of jazz instruments. In this study, drums and double-bass were recorded in an ensemble but on single tracks. Three modern beat tracking algorithms were examined: LibRosa Dynamic, Essentia Multi-Feature, and madmom RNN. The algorithms’ beat trackings were evaluated using common metrics: the F-measure, P-score and Cemgil accuracy. The results showed that bass tracks generally got consistent results from all algorithms. However, all algorithms struggled with octave errors (the detected number of beats is off by a factor of two) and off-beats. When music was played without restrictions to the beat rhythm, madmom RNN generally performed the best, which suggests that machine learning with RNN (recurrent neural networks) is a good approach for beat tracking on rhythmically complex tracks.