Onset detection of Tabla Strokes using LP Analysis

Onset detection is an important first step in music analysis. We propose a pre-processing scheme for improved onset detection of complex strokes of Indian percussion instruments with resonance characteristics. In this work, we explore the onset detection of Tabla (Indian percussion instrument) strokes. The resonance characteristics of tabla strokes poses challenges to onset detection. In such cases, the energy-based and spectral flux-based onset detectors are often inaccurate on the raw signal. We propose an onset detection algorithm addressing these challenges using Linear Prediction (LP) analysis and Hilbert envelope (HE) in tandem. Tabla signal is modeled using LP, and its residual highlights the onset time instances very well. Unipolar nature of HE on top of LP residual further enhances the onset instances. Onset detection is performed using energy based, spectral flux based and the state of the art Machine Learning based onset detectors on the Hilbert envelope of LP residual (HELP). Experiments were performed on tabla solo played at various tempi and the results show that the HELP based approach provides 12% relative improvement in F-measures compared to the performance on raw tabla signal.