Automated violin fingering transcription through analysis of an audio recording

  • Authors:
  • Akira Maezawa;Katsutoshi Itoyama;Kazunori Komatani;Tetsuya Ogata;Hiroshi G. Okuno

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Kyoto University Graduate School of Informatics, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan. akira_maezawa@gmx.yamaha.com Venue:

  • Computer Music Journal
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We present a method to recuperate fingerings for a given piece of violin music in order to recreate the timbre of a given audio recording of the piece. This is achieved by first analyzing an audio signal to determine the most likely sequence of two-dimensional fingerboard locations (string number and location along the string), which recovers elements of violin fingering relevant to timbre. This sequence is then used as a constraint for finding an ergonomic sequence of finger placements that satisfies both the sequence of notated pitch and the given fingerboard-location sequence. Fingerboard-location-sequence estimation is based on estimation of a hidden Markov model, each state of which represents a particular fingerboard location and emits a Gaussian mixture model of the relative strengths of harmonics. The relative strengths of harmonics are estimated from a polyphonic mixture using score-informed source segregation, and compensates for discrepancies between observed data and training data through mean normalization. Fingering estimation is based on the modeling of a cost function for a sequence of finger placements. We tailor our model to incorporate the playing practices of the violin. We evaluate the performance of the fingerboard-location estimator with a polyphonic mixture, and with recordings of a violin whose timbral characteristics differ significantly from that of the training data. We subjectively evaluate the fingering estimator and validate the effectiveness of tailoring the fingering model towards the violin.