RESEARCH ARTICLE Model cortical responses for the detection of perceptual onsets and beat tracking in singing.

We describe a biophysically motivated model of auditory salience based on a model of cortical responses, and present results which show that the derived measure of salience can be used to successfully identify the position of perceptual onsets in a musical stimulus. The salience measure is also shown to be useful for tracking beats and predicting rhythmic structure in the stimulus on the basis of its periodicity patterns. We evaluate the method using a corpus of unaccompanied freely sung stimuli and show that the metho dp erforms well, in some cases better than state-of-the-art algorithms. These results ar ed eserving of attention because they are derived from a general model of auditory processing and not an arbitrary model achieving best performance in onset detection, or beat tracking tasks.