text: Automatic note-level transcription is considered one of the most challenging tasks in music information retrieval. The specific case of flamenco singing transcription poses a particular challenge due to its complex melodic progressions, intonation inaccuracies, the use of a high degree of ornamentation, and the presence of guitar accompaniment. In this study, we explore the limitations of existing state of the art transcription systems for the case of flamenco singing and propose a specific solution for this genre: We first extract the predominant melody and apply a novel contour filtering process to eliminate segments of the pitch contour which originate from the guitar accompaniment. We formulate a set of onset detection functions based on volume and pitch characteristics to segment the resulting vocal pitch contour into discrete note events. A quantised pitch label is assigned to each note event by combining global pitch class probabilities with local pitch contour statistics. The proposed system outperforms state of the art singing transcription systems with respect to voicing accuracy, onset detection, and overall performance when evaluated on flamenco singing datasets.
  @cite_37: An examination of the problem of producing a written score from a piece of polyphonic music has been done with the result that a program to accomplish this end for a restricted class of input samples has been written and debugged. The program uses bandpass filtering to extract individual harmonic data. Two examples are presented here that show the viability of the system given the restrictions on the music under analysis.
  @cite_18: The aim of this overview is to describe methods for the automatic transcription of Western polyphonic music. The transcription task is here understood as transforming an acoustic musical signal into a MIDI-like symbolic representation. Only pitched musical instruments are considered: recognizing the sounds of drum instruments is not discussed. The main emphasis is laid on estimating the multiple fundamental frequencies of several concurrent sounds. Various approaches to solve this problem are discussed, including methods that are based on modelling the human auditory periphery, methods that mimic the human auditory scene analysis function, signal model-based Bayesian inference methods, and data-adaptive methods. Another subproblem addressed is the rhythmic parsing of acoustic musical signals. From the transcription point of view, this amounts to the temporal segmentation of music signals at different time scales. The relationship between the two subproblems and the general structure of the transcription p...
  @cite_17: Automatic music transcription is considered by many to be a key enabling technology in music signal processing. However, the performance of transcription systems is still significantly below that of a human expert, and accuracies reported in recent years seem to have reached a limit, although the field is still very active. In this paper we analyse limitations of current methods and identify promising directions for future research. Current transcription methods use general purpose models which are unable to capture the rich diversity found in music signals. One way to overcome the limited performance of transcription systems is to tailor algorithms to specific use-cases. Semi-automatic approaches are another way of achieving a more reliable transcription. Also, the wealth of musical scores and corresponding audio data now available are a rich potential source of training data, via forced alignment of audio to scores, but large scale utilisation of such data has yet to be attempted. Other promising approaches include the integration of information from multiple algorithms and different musical aspects.
summary: Approaches to automatic note-level transcription from audio recordings date back as far as 1977 @cite_37 and are extensively reviewed by @cite_18 and @cite_17 . Most systems described in these reviews provide a generic transcription framework covering a wide range of instruments and musical genres. As mentioned in @cite_17 , specific instruments exhibit particular characteristics which might not be captured by a generic transcription system.