JIT-MPE: Just-in-Time Multi-Pitch Estimation under Output Deadlines

Live pitch displays, score followers and accompaniment systems must know which pitches are sounding within tens of milliseconds, but instrument-agnostic multi-pitch estimation (MPE) has mainly been designed and evaluated offline. We present JIT-MPE, a causal MPE model of 86k parameters for mixed ensembles. It gives an immediate estimate of each 20 ms frame and re-estimates the same frame as 20, 40, 80 and 160 ms of further audio arrive, so that a live display can show pitches at once and then refine them. We score each output only at a deadline by which it can be computed from the audio that has arrived, on five development sets and four held-out sets evaluated only after all design choices were frozen. At a 50 ms deadline, which reads the update made with 40 ms of lookahead, JIT-MPE is significantly more accurate than five of six published offline MPE systems in 38 of 45 comparisons (15 of 20 on the held-out sets) and less accurate in only two, although these systems read the whole recording and all but one have 6 to 170 times as many parameters; the sixth, supervised on URMP, is higher on four of the nine sets. The deadline costs little: on the held-out sets, JIT-MPE at 50 ms is within -1.27 to +0.60 points of recording-level macro F1 of its own final output with 160 ms of lookahead and within -2.08 to +0.79 points of a bidirectional model of similar size. Waiting pays off where the immediate estimate is weakest: the update at 50 ms adds 1.7-3.6 points over it on the development data and three of the four held-out sets, and raises the recall of reference frames in the first 20 ms after a note onset from 9.8% to 38.4% on the held-out AAM set. The slowest measured frame takes at most 4.15 ms on one CPU thread. Code and trained weights are available at https://github.com/Frieve-A/jit-mpe.