Modeling Musical Onset Probabilities via Neural Distribution Learning

Abstract: Musical onset detection can be formulated as a time-to-event (TTE) or time-since-event (TSE) prediction task by defining music as a sequence of onset events. Here we propose a novel method to model the probability of onsets by introducing a sequential density prediction model. The proposed model estimates TTE & TSE distributions from mel-spectrograms using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as a density predictor. We evaluate our model on the Bock dataset show-ing comparable results to previous deep-learning models.