Automatic Music Accompanist
This addresses the challenge of real-time computer accompaniment for musicians, but it is incremental as it builds on existing HMM-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automatic musical accompaniment by constructing a system that follows a human musician's performance using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), proposing a new parallel HMM and fast decoding algorithm to handle performance errors.
Automatic musical accompaniment is where a human musician is accompanied by a computer musician. The computer musician is able to produce musical accompaniment that relates musically to the human performance. The accompaniment should follow the performance using observations of the notes they are playing. This paper describes a complete and detailed construction of a score following and accompanying system using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). It details how to train a score HMM, how to deal with polyphonic input, how this HMM work when following score, how to build up a musical accompanist. It proposes a new parallel hidden Markov model for score following and a fast decoding algorithm to deal with performance errors.