Towards Rhythmic Content Processing of Musical Signals: Fostering Complementary Approaches

This paper is concerned with the handling of rhythm in music content processing applications. Keeping this framework in mind, we briefly report on terminology issues and the interdisciplinary nature of rhythm investigations, we then review approaches to computational modeling of rhythm and rhythm representation schemes. We comment the bottom-up and top-down oriented approaches to computational modeling and the parallel that some authors make with physiological and cognitive views on rhythm perception. We argue that investigations should be listener-oriented, signal-oriented and application-oriented.