Structural Segmentation of Multitrack Audio

Structural segmentation of musical audio signals is one of many active areas of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research. One aspect of this important topic which has so far received little attention though is the potential advantage to be gained by utilizing multitrack audio. This paper gives an overview of current segmentation techniques, and demonstrates that by applying a particular segmentation algorithm to multitrack data, rather than the usual case of fully mixed audio, we achieve a significant and quantifiable increase in accuracy when locating segment boundaries. Additionally, we provide details of a structurally annotated multitrack test set available for use by other researchers.