An image analysis approach for transcription of music played on keyboard-like instruments

Abstract

Music transcription refers to the process of analyzing a piece of music to generate a sequence of constituent notes and their duration. Transcription of music from audio signals is fraught with problems due to auditory interference such as ambient noise, multiple instruments playing simultaneously, accompanying vocals or polyphonic sounds. For several instruments, there exists added information for music transcription which can be derived from a video sequence of the instrument as it is being played. This paper proposes a method to utilize this visual information for the case of keyboard-like instruments to generate a transcript automatically, by analyzing the video frames. We present encouraging results under varying lighting conditions on different song sequences played out on a keyboard.