Automatic music transcription : an exploratory study

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:In a pioneering project for the University of Stellenbosch, and indeed South Africa, anautomatic music transcription system was designed to explore the underlying theory,concepts and problematies of polyphonic music transcription.Automatic music transcription involves knowledge from the fields of acoustics, musictheory, digital signal processing and information theory. The key concepts from thesecontributing fields as they relate to transcription systems are described in overview. Atranscription system is then developed which includes components for FFT-based multipitchestimation, basic post-processing, estimation of the degree of polyphony, key determination,note duration quantisation and score output. The operation of the system isexplained and tested at the hand of a synthetic polyphonic signal.The system produced usable transcriptions of real monophonic input signals to scoreswith standard notational symbols. The success of the system (as are the successes ofall published polyphonic transcription systems) was limited for real polyphonic musicsignals. Nonetheless, the initial results are encouraging and indicate that the currentimplementation can serve as a platform for a more sophisticated and accurate system.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University