Tempo Induction from Music Recordings Using Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition Analysis

Tempo and beat are among the most important features of Western music. Owing to the perceptual nature of tempo, its automatic analysis and extraction remains a difficult task for a large variety of music genres. Western music notation represents musical events using a hierarchical metrical structure distinguishing different time scales. This hierarchy is often modeled using three levels: the tatum, the tactus, and the measure. The tatum represents the shortest durational value in music that is not just an accidental phenomenon (Bilmes 1993). The tactus period is the most perceptually prominent period, and is the period at which most humans would tap their feet in time with the music (Lerdah…