Papers for

dance app designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

CASM improves music beat tracking by adapting to local context

CASM: Context-Aware Semi-Markov Post-Processor for Beat Tracking

Abstract: In music beat tracking, model-predicted activations must be decoded into a discrete, musically coherent event sequence. Direct peak picking closely follows local evidence but can retain spurious peaks or miss weak beats. Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs), a widely used structured post-processor, improve sequence consistency under predefined global tempo, meter, and transition constraints, but their behavior can depend strongly on these settings. We introduce CASM, a context-aware semi-Markov decoder that instead conditions its temporal constraint on local activation evidence. CASM also accounts for ambiguity among competing periodic interpretations, including half- and double-tempo alternatives. Deterministic safeguards prevent implausible outputs and preserve beat-downbeat consistency. Applied to fixed activations from three neural beat trackers (BeatThis, MSCNN, and TCN), CASM improves temporal continuity while preserving event-level F1 across the GTZAN and SMC datasets, without backbone retraining or dataset-specific retuning. Further analysis shows that CASM is less sensitive than the DBN baseline to the composition of the calibration data.

Wed 7 OctSound
The gist
Music beat tracking involves detecting when beats happen in a song, but picking beats directly from signals can be noisy or miss important beats. The authors developed CASM, a new method that adapts to local evidence in the music rather than relying on fixed tempo rules. CASM helps produce smoother and more accurate beat sequences without needing to retrain the main models or adjust settings for different datasets. This makes beat tracking better at handling tricky cases like beats that come at different speeds or ambiguous rhythms.
Open → 2610.09318v1