Piano Sustain-pedal Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Recent research on piano transcription has focused primarily on note events. Very few studies have investigated pedalling techniques, which form an important aspect of expressive piano music performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method for piano sustain-pedal detection based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Inspired by different acoustic characteristics at the start (pedal onset) versus during the pedalled segment, two binary classifiers are trained separately to learn both temporal dependencies and timbral features using CNN. Their outputs are fused in order to decide whether a portion in a piano recording is played with the sustain pedal. The proposed architecture and our detection system are assessed using a dataset with frame-wise pedal on/off annotations. An average F1 score of 0.74 is obtained for the test set. The method performs better on pieces of Romantic-era composers, who intended to deliver more colours to the piano sound through pedalling techniques.