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_14: This paper introduces a new unsupervised and score-informed method for the segmentation of singing voice into syllables. The main idea of the proposed method is to detect the syllable onset on a probability density function by incorporating a priori syllable duration derived from the score. Firstly, intensity profiles are used to exploit the characteristics of singing voice depending on the Mel-frequency regions. Then, the syllable onset probability density function is obtained by selecting candidates over the intensity profiles and weighted for the purpose of emphasizing the onset regions. Finally, the syllable duration distribution shaped by the score is incorporated into Viterbi decoding to determine the optimal sequence of onset time positions. The proposed method outperforms conventional methods for the segmentation of syllable on a jingju (also known as Peking or Beijing opera) a cappella dataset. An analysis is conducted on precision errors to provide direction for future improvement.
  @cite_3: This paper introduces a new score-informed method for the segmentation of jingju a cappella singing phrase into syllables. The proposed method estimates the most likely sequence of syllable boundaries given the estimated syllable onset detection function (ODF) and its score. Throughout the paper, we first examine the jingju syllables structure and propose a definition of the term "syllable onset". Then, we identify which are the challenges that jingju a cappella singing poses. Further, we investigate how to improve the syllable ODF estimation with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We propose a novel CNN architecture that allows to efficiently capture different time-frequency scales for estimating syllable onsets. In addition, we propose using a score-informed Viterbi algorithm -instead of thresholding the onset function-, because the available musical knowledge we have (the score) can be used to inform the Viterbi algorithm in order to overcome the identified challenges. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in syllable segmentation for jingju a cappella singing. We further provide an analysis of the segmentation errors which points possible research directions.
  @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.
summary: The last step of the pipeline -- onset selection can be done by peak-picking @cite_12 or hidden Markov model (HMM) inference @cite_14 @cite_3 if the musical score is available.