IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2017

IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2017

Real-Time Beat Tracking Challenge

The IEEE Signal Processing Society announces the fourth edition of the Signal Processing Cup: a real-time beat tracking challenge.

The beat is a salient periodicity in a music signal. It provides a fundamental unit of time and foundation for the temporal structure of the music. As Meinard Müller says (Fundamentals of Music Processing, Springer, 2015), “It is the beat that drives music forward and provides the temporal framework of a piece of music. Intuitively, the beat corresponds to the pulse a human taps along when listening to music.” Beat tracking underlies music information retrieval research and provides for beat synchronous analysis of music. It has applications in segmentation of audio, interactive musical accompaniment, cover-song detection, music similarity, chord estimation, and music transcription. It is a fundamental signal processing task of interest to any company providing information services related to music (adapted from Degara et al., Reliability-informed beat tracking of musical signals, IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 20:1, 290-301, 2011).

The goal of this challenge is to implement a real-time beat tracker on an embedded platform and to demonstrate the performance with a creative output such as, but not limited to, drumming, dancing, or flickering lights. It is challenging to perform beat tracking in real time because the complete signal is not available. It is also challenging because there can be a wide variety of musical input and the system needs to perform well on all of them.

The competition consists of two stages, open competition that any eligible team can participate, and the final competition that is only open to finalists. The first stage of the open competition starts on June 30, 2016 ending November 7, 2016 and tasks of the second stage must be completed by December 21, 2016. The three best teams are selected and announced by January 10, 2017. The final competition will be completed by the three finalist teams and will be judged at ICASSP 2017 which will be held March 5-9, 2017.

• Registration: CLOSED
• Detailed information on the competition: SP Cup 2017 Document
• Additional details