Isolated instrument transcription using a deep belief network

Automatic music transcription is a difficult task that has provoked extensive research on transcription systems that are predominantly general purpose, processing any number or type of instruments sounding simultaneously. This paper presents a polyphonic transcription system that is constrained to processing the output of a single instrument with an upper bound on polyphony. For example, a guitar has six strings and is limited to producing six notes simultaneously. The transcription system consists of a novel pitch estimation algorithm that uses a deep belief network and multi-label learning techniques to generate multiple pitch estimates for each audio analysis frame, such that the polyphony does not exceed that of the instrument. The implemented transcription system is evaluated on a compiled dataset of synthesized guitar recordings. Comparing these results to a prior single-instrument polyphonic transcription system that received exceptional results, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of deep, multi-label learning for the task of polyphonic transcription.