In-Depth Performance Analysis of the ADTOF-Based Algorithm for Automatic Drum Transcription

The importance of automatic drum transcription lies in the potential to extract useful information from a musical track; however, the low reliability of the models for this task represents a limiting factor. Indeed, even though in the recent literature the quality of the generated transcription has improved thanks to the curation of large training datasets via crowdsourcing, there is still a large margin of improvement for this task to be considered solved. Aiming to steer the development of future models, we identify the most common errors from training and testing on the aforementioned crowdsourced datasets. We perform this study in three steps: First, we detail the quality of the transcription for each class of interest; second, we employ a new metric and a pseudo confusion matrix to quantify different mistakes in the estimations; last, we compute the agreement between different annotators of the same track to estimate the accuracy of the ground-truth. Our findings are twofold: On the one hand, we observe that the previously reported issue that less represented instruments (e.g., toms) are less reliably transcribed is mostly solved now. On the other hand, cymbal instruments have unprecedented relative low performance. We provide intuitive explanations as to why cymbal instruments are difficult to transcribe and we identify that they represent the main source of disagreement among annotators.