Abstract
Tracking beats of singing voices without the presence of musical
accompaniment can find many applications in music production, automatic
song arrangement, and social media interaction. Its main challenge is
the lack of strong rhythmic and harmonic patterns that are important for
music rhythmic analysis in general. Even for human listeners, this can
be a challenging task. As a result, existing music beat tracking systems
fail to deliver satisfactory performance on singing voices. In this
paper, we propose singing beat tracking as a novel task, and propose the
first approach to solving this task. Our approach leverages semantic
information of singing voices by employing pre-trained self-supervised
WavLM and DistilHuBERT speech representations as the front-end and uses
a self-attention encoder layer to predict beats. To train and test the
system, we obtain separated singing voices and their beat annotations
using source separation and beat tracking on complete songs, followed by
manual corrections. Experiments on the 741 separated vocal tracks of the
GTZAN dataset show that the proposed system outperforms several
state-of-the-art music beat tracking methods by a large margin in terms
of beat tracking accuracy. Ablation studies also confirm the advantages
of pre-trained self-supervised speech representations over generic
spectral features.