Onset Detection, Music Transcription and Ornament Detection for the the Traditional Irish Fiddle

Aileen Kelleher, Dublin Institute of Technology
Derry Fitzgerald, Dublin Institute of Technology
Eugene Coyle, Dublin Institute of Technology
Robert Lawlor, Dublin Institute of Technology
Mikel Gainza, Dublin Institute of Technology

Document Type Conference Paper

118th AES Convention, Barcelona, Spain, 2005

Abstract

By combining techniques used in previous onset detectors, a system that detects note onsets in traditional Irish fiddle tunes has been implemented. The notes detected also include the most common types of ornamentation played by the fiddle. Ornaments are notes of extremely short duration, at most a fifth the length of a regular note. A Short Time Fourier Transform based sub-band technique, which previously gave good results for the Irish tin whistle, was modified to include a threshold approximation more suitable for the fiddle. This system has been tested on a database of real recorded fiddle tunes and good results have been achieved.