Techniques for improving an automatic accompaniment system

In this talk we will present several techniques to improve an automatic accompaniment system following the line of research of Roger B. Dannenberg, professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

An automatic accompaniment system, basically, compares the events of a live performance with the ones of a score and, inferring the musician's tempo, plays the appropriate accompaniment.

Early implementations had some limitations to recognize and follow a real-time performance. This demanded, in a way, that the soloist played the notes of the score in a more orderly fashion.

Among the techniques developed to overcome these problems we have a method to deal with trills and glissandos in input processing, the use of parallelism in the matching between performance and score and the delay in reporting the position of the musician to the accompaniment synthesis module.