On Measuring Syncopation to Drive an Interactive Music System

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of measuring syncopation in order to mediate a musically meaningful interaction between a live music performance and an automatically generated rhythm. To this end we present a simple, yet effective interactive music system we developed. We shed some light on the complex nature of syncopation by looking into MIDI data from drum loops and whole songs. We conclude that segregation into individual rhythmic layers is necessary in order to measure the syncopation of a music ensemble. This implies that measuring syncopation on polyphonic audio signals is not yet tractable using the current state-of-the-art in audio analysis.