Beat Tracking the Graphical Model Way

Dixon describes beats as follows: "much music has as its rhythmic basis a series of pulses, spaced approximately equally in time, relative to which the timing of all musical events can be described. This phenomenon is called the beat, and the individual pulses are also called beats"[1]. Given a piece of recorded music (an MP3 file, for example), we wish to produce a set of beats that correspond to the beats perceived by human listeners. The set of beats of a song can be characterised by the trajectories through time of thetempo and phase offset. Tempo is typically measured in beats per minute (BPM), and describes the frequency of beats.