Subband-based Drum Transcription for Audio Signals

Content-based analysis of music can help manage the increasing amounts of music information available digitally and is becoming an important part of multimedia research. The use of drums and percussive sounds is pervasive to popular and world music. In this paper we describe an automatic system for detecting and transcribing low and medium-high frequency drum events from audio signals. Two different subband front-ends are utilized. The first is based on bandpass filters and the second is based on wavelet analysis. Experimental results utilizing music, drum loops and Indian tabla thekas as signals are provided. The proposed system can be used as a preprocessing step for rhythm-based music classification and retrieval. In addition it can be used for pedagogical purposes