Joint Multi-Pitch Detection and Score Transcription for Polyphonic Piano Music

Research on automatic music transcription has largely focused on multi-pitch detection; there is limited discussion on how to obtain a machine- or human-readable score transcription. In this paper, we propose a method for joint multi-pitch detection and score transcription for polyphonic piano music. The outputs of our system include both a piano-roll representation (a descriptive transcription) and a symbolic musical notation (a prescriptive transcription). Unlike traditional methods that further convert MIDI transcriptions into musical scores, we use a multitask model combined with a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network and Sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanisms. We propose a Reshaped score representation that outperforms a LilyPond representation in terms of both prediction accuracy and time/memory resources, and compare different input audio spectrograms. We also create a new synthesized dataset for score transcription research. Experimental results show that the joint model outperforms a single-task model in score transcription.