text: In this paper, we propose an efficient and reproducible deep learning model for musical onset detection (MOD). We first review the state-of-the-art deep learning models for MOD, and identify their shortcomings and challenges: (i) the lack of hyper-parameter tuning details, (ii) the non-availability of code for training models on other datasets, and (iii) ignoring the network capability when comparing different architectures. Taking the above issues into account, we experiment with seven deep learning architectures. The most efficient one achieves equivalent performance to our implementation of the state-of-the-art architecture. However, it has only 28.3 of the total number of trainable parameters compared to the state-of-the-art. Our experiments are conducted using two different datasets: one mainly consists of instrumental music excerpts, and another developed by ourselves includes only solo singing voice excerpts. Further, inter-dataset transfer learning experiments are conducted. The results show that the model pre-trained on one dataset fails to detect onsets on another dataset, which denotes the importance of providing the implementation code to enable re-training the model for a different dataset. Datasets, code and a Jupyter notebook running on Google Colab are publicly available to make this research understandable and easy to reproduce.
  @cite_26: Many different onset detection methods have been proposed in recent years. However those that perform well tend to be highly specialised for certain types of music, while those that are more widely applicable give only moderate performance. In this paper we present a new onset detector with superior performance and temporal precision for all kinds of music, including complex music mixes. It is based on auditory spectral features and relative spectral differences processed by a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network, which acts as reduction function. The network is trained with a large database of onset data covering various genres and onset types. Due to the data driven nature, our approach does not require the onset detection method and its parameters to be tuned to a particular type of music. We compare results on the Bello onset data set and can conclude that our approach is on par with related results on the same set and outperforms them in most cases in terms of F1-measure. For complex music with mixed onset types, an absolute improvement of 3.6 is reported.
  @cite_22: 
  @cite_7: We present a new onset detection algorithm which operates online in real time without delay. Our method incorporates a recurrent neural network to model the sequence of onsets based solely on causal audio signal information. Comparative performance against existing state-of-the-art online and offline algorithms was evaluated using a very large database. The new method ‐ despite being an online algorithm ‐ shows performance only slightly short of the best existing offline methods while outperforming standard approaches.
  @cite_15: Summary form only given. Note onsets mark the beginning of attack transients, short areas of a note containing rapid changes of the signal spectral content. Detecting onsets is not trivial, especially when analysing complex mixtures. Applications for note onset detection systems include time stretching, audio coding and synthesis. An alternative to standard energy-based onset detection is proposed by using phase information. It is suggested that by observing the frame-by-frame distribution of differential angles, the precise moment when onsets occur can be detected with accuracy. Statistical measures are used to build the detection function. The system is tested and tuned on a database of complex recordings.
  @cite_13: 
  @cite_12: In this paper, we evaluate various onset detection algorithms in terms of their online capabilities. Most methods use some kind of normalization over time, which renders them unusable for online tasks. We modified existing methods to enable online application and evaluated their performance on a large dataset consisting of 27,774 annotated onsets. We focus particularly on the incorporated preprocessing and peak detection methods. We show that, with the right choice of parameters, the maximum achievable performance is in the same range as that of offline algorithms, and that preprocessing can improve the results considerably. Furthermore, we propose a new onset detection method based on the common spectral flux and a new peak-picking method which outperforms traditional methods both online and offline and works with audio signals of various volume levels.
  @cite_20: Musical onset detection is one of the most elementary tasks in music analysis, but still only solved imperfectly for polyphonic music signals. Interpreted as a computer vision problem in spectrograms, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) seem to be an ideal fit. On a dataset of about 100 minutes of music with 26k annotated onsets, we show that CNNs outperform the previous state-of-the-art while requiring less manual preprocessing. Investigating their inner workings, we find two key advantages over hand-designed methods: Using separate detectors for percussive and harmonic onsets, and combining results from many minor variations of the same scheme. The results suggest that even for well-understood signal processing tasks, machine learning can be superior to knowledge engineering.
summary: Various audio input representations have been used for the first step of the pipeline, such as filtered logarithmic magnitude and phase spectrum @cite_15 @cite_13 . The former can be subdivided by the filterbank type -- Bark scale bands @cite_7 , Mel scale bands @cite_26 @cite_20 or constant-Q bands @cite_22 @cite_12 .