Join the 2017 real-time beat tracking competition?

Foot-tapping shoe competition at the 1994 ICMC in Aarhus, Denmark.

In 1994 we organized at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) a foot-tapping competition on the computational modeling of beat perception.  Several researchers had their latest models control a mechanical shoe, while listening to a variety of national anthems. (See the Dutch Clog in action in the picture above, and below the original prototype.)

At an upcoming IEEE conference a similar challenge will be held. I'm quite exited about that. It is intriguing to see that a skill that is apparently so trivial for humans continues to be a challenge for machines (cf. Honing, 2013).

A prototype tapping in the P.C.Hoofthuis at the
University of Amsterdam in 1993.

The goal of the IEEE challenge is to implement a real-time beat tracker on an embedded platform and to demonstrate the performance with a creative output such as, but not limited to, drumming, dancing, or flickering lights. It is challenging to perform beat tracking in real time because the complete signal is not available. It is also challenging because there can be a wide variety of musical input and the system needs to perform well on all of them. For more information on why beat perception / beat tracking is interesting, see Dan Levitin's This is your brain on music, cited in the IEEE Cup Challenge document.

Important Dates: November 7, 2016 - Registration Deadline
March 5-9, 2017 - Final Competition at ICASSP 2017

Detailed information can be found here.

Honing, H. (2013) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.