Problem-solving Strategies in a Music Transcription System

Abstract

Mustc transcrtptton 1s a stgntttcant problem 1n machtne perceptton . The system dtscussed in thts paper, MANA , takes as tnput etther the sound ot a recorded pertormance , or data captured ustng a muslcal keyboard.. It produces conventtonal mustcal notatton as output. It has successtully handled pteces rangtng trom 18th-century plano mustc to tmprovtsattons on conga drums, in the AtroCuban style. The paper descrlbes the key tdeas and techntques round tn the temporal analysts component or MANA, the goal ot whtch 1s to asstgn a rhythmtc value to each note played . Perceptton seems to result trom the tnterplay ot sensory evtdence and pre-extsttng mental structures, datadrtven agents pttted agatnst model-driven agents 1n the tormatten ot hypothe.ses that seem tolerable to our prejudices and not too dtstant from the data . To thts ttrst order vtew one must add a second order one, whtch allows the system to nottce patterns among parttally elaborated hypotheses , and to use these patterns to alter conftdence ra t tngs, accordtng to " peer pressure" rules . Concerntng the use ot multiple criteria tor hypothests evaluatton and pruntng, whtch necessary in the context ot perceptton systems , tt ls argued that the use ot partial orders over multi-dimensional spaces ot natural crtterta yteld more robust methods that approaches based on combtntng crtterta down to scalars .