P6-10: Modeling Bends in Popular Music Guitar Tablatures
Alexandre D'Hooge (Université de Lille)*, Louis Bigo (Université de Lille), Ken Déguernel (CNRS)
Subjects (starting with primary): MIR fundamentals and methodology -> symbolic music processing ; Applications -> music composition, performance, and production ; Knowledge-driven approaches to MIR ; Musical features and properties -> expression and performative aspects of music
Presented In Person: 4-minute short-format presentation
Tablature notation is widely used in popular music to transcribe and share guitar musical content. As a complement to standard score notation, tablatures transcribe performance gesture information including finger positions and a variety of guitar-specific playing techniques such as slides, hammer-on/pull-off or bends. This paper focuses on bends, which enable to progressively shift the pitch of a note, therefore circumventing physical limitations of the discrete fretted fingerboard.
In this paper, we propose a set of 25 high-level features, computed for each note of the tablature, to study how bend occurrences can be predicted from their past and future short-term context. Experiments are performed on a corpus of 932 lead guitar tablatures of popular music and show that a decision tree successfully predicts bend occurrences with an F1 score of 0.71 and a limited amount of false positive predictions, demonstrating promising applications to assist the arrangement of
non-guitar music into guitar tablatures.
If the video does not load properly please use the direct link to video