Estimating note intensities in music recordings

In this paper, we present automated methods for estimating note intensities in music recordings. Given a MIDI file (representing the score) and an audio recording (representing an interpretation) of a piece of music, our idea is to parametrize the spectrogram of the audio recording by exploiting the MIDI information and then to estimate the note intensities from the resulting model. The model is based on the idea of note-event spectrograms describing the part of a spectrogram that can be attributed to a given note event. After initializing our model with note events provided by the MIDI, we adapt all model parameters such that our model spectrogram approximates the audio spectrogram as accurately as possible. While note-wise intensity estimation is a very challenging task for general music, our experiments indicate promising results on polyphonic piano music.