Determination of the meter of musical scores by autocorrelation

A single voice extracted from the scores of compositions from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary periods has been studied in order to determine the feasibility of the determination of musical meter by computer. The method of autocorrelation is appropriate for this calculation since it is a measure of the frequency of occurrence of events following an event at time zero. If a greater frequency of events occurs on the downbeat of a measure as predicted by Palmer and Krumhansl ‘‘Mental Representations for Musical Meter,’’ J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Percept. Perform. 16, 728–741 (1990), then a peak in the autocorrelation function should indicate the time for a single measure. The results of these computations indicate that computer determination of meter from score events is indeed possible. An example is included to show that this method of analysis can be applied to live performance data as well.