Real-time musical note onset detection plays a vital role in many audio
analysis processes, such as score following, beat detection and various sound
synthesis by analysis methods. This paper provides a review of some of the
most commonly used techniques for real-time onset detection. We suggest
ways to improve these techniques by incorporating linear prediction, as well
as presenting a novel algorithm for real-time onset detection using sinusoidal
modelling. We provide comprehensive results for both the detection accuracy
and the computational performance of all of the described techniques,
evaluated using Modal, our new open source library for musical onset detection,
which comes with a free database of samples with hand-labelled note
onsets
