Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2604.15278

A Manual Bar-by-Bar Tempo Measurement Protocol for Polyphonic Chamber Music Recordings: Design, Validation, and Application to Beethoven's Piano and Cello Sonatas

Ignasi Sole
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Empirical performance analysis depends on the accurate extraction of tempo data from recordings, yet standard computational tools, designed for monophonic audio or modern studio conditions, fail systematically when applied to historical polyphonic chamber music. This paper documents the failure of automated beat-detection software on duo recordings of Beethoven's five piano and cello sonatas (Op.~5 Nos.~1 and~2; Op.~69; Op.~102 Nos.~1 and~2), and presents a formalised manual alternative: a cumulative lap-timer protocol that yields bar-level beats-per-minute data with millisecond resolution. The protocol, developed in cross-disciplinary collaboration with an engineer specialising in VLSI design, rests on a cumulative timestamp architecture that prevents error accumulation, permits internal self-validation, and captures expressive timing phenomena (rubato, fermatas, accelerandi, ritardandi) that automated tools systematically suppress or misread. The mathematical derivation of the BPM formula, the spreadsheet data structure, and the error characterisation are presented in full. Applied to over one hundred movement-level recordings spanning 1930--2012, the protocol generated a dataset subsequently visualised through tempographs, histograms with spline-smoothed probability density functions, ridgeline plots, and combination charts. The paper argues that manual annotation is not a methodological retreat but a principled response to the intrinsic limitations of computational tools when faced with the specific challenges of polyphonic historical recordings. The complete dataset and analysis code are publicly available.

Explore related subjects

cs.SDeess.AS

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ignasi Sole. 2026-04-16. A Manual Bar-by-Bar Tempo Measurement Protocol for Polyphonic Chamber Music Recordings: Design, Validation, and Application to Beethoven's Piano and Cello Sonatas. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15278

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Text-only adaptation in LLM-based ASR through text denoising

Adapting large language model (LLM)-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to new domains using text-only data is a significant yet underexplored challenge. Standard fine-tuning of the LLM on the target domain text often disrupts the critical alignment between the speech and text modality learned by the projector, degrading performance. We introduce a novel text-only adaptation method that frames this process as a text denoising task. Our approach trains the LLM to recover clean transcripts from noisy inputs. This process effectively adapts the model to a target domain while preserving cross-modal alignment. Our solution is lightweight, requiring no architectural changes or additional parameters. Extensive evaluation on two datasets demonstrates up to 22.1% relative improvement, outperforming recent state-of-the-art text-only adaptation methods.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Discrete vs. Continuous: A Comprehensive Study of Unified Audio Understanding in LALMs

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) utilize either continuous features or discrete tokens, yet the optimal representation paradigm for general audio understanding remains debated. Existing benchmarks often focus on narrow domains or evaluate encoders outside LALM contexts. To address these gaps, we systematically evaluate continuous and discrete representations across speech, sound and music. Utilizing our UniARC framework with dual evaluation strategies across model scales from SmolLM2-135M to Llama-3-8B, we analyze the dynamic relationships of data volume, model capacity, and computational efficiency. Our results reveal the pivotal role of semantic constraints in tokenization for audio understanding and demonstrate that scaling backbones fail to compensate for information loss in audio representation, especially in data-limited tasks. These findings offer practical guidance for balancing semantic density, fidelity, and efficiency in future LALMs.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Synthesis and editing of multi-instrument audio mixtures using scalar-quantised latents with MIDI Span conditioning

Music creation often involves iterative refinement, changing selected musical details while retaining the rest. To support such refinement, we introduce SpanSynth-Edit, a flow-matching model for MIDI-guided synthesis and editing of multi-instrument audio mixtures using low-frame-rate scalar-quantised latents. MIDI Span encodes instrument-labelled note lifecycles as unordered event sets with continuous-valued attributes and pools each set into one conditioning vector per audio-latent frame. The model uses contextual audio for instrument-specific timbre guidance and supports editing by resynthesising the target region from revised MIDI. Experiments on single- and multi-instrument benchmarks show competitive performance and demonstrate within-frame onset control. We also discuss limitations of transcription-based note-adherence evaluation.

cs.SD↗