Development and analysis of beat and tone detection for boomwhackers

At primary schools in the Netherlands, providing good music education is a challenge for teachers. Improving the quality of feedback on a musical performance of a group of children can be supported by digital technology. This study researches the potential of a system that can detect beats and tones of boomwhackers, a commonly used instrument at schools. For this, characteristics of boomwhacker sound were first thoroughly examined. A program for beat detection from a live audio feed was, in a noiseless setting, up to 100% accurate. However, processing delays were significant. Additionally, the beat detection is not boomwhacker specific. Furthermore, three different methods of tone detection have been developed iteratively. All were tested on a dedicated sample database, containing single boomwhacker tones and tone combinations. The accuracy scores of these methods were 47.6% (normalisation based), 62.8% (peak based) and 86.0% (subtraction based) respectively. The accuracy scores are an indication, actual performance of a tone detection method depends on the goal of application. Tone detection is possible based using just the fundamental frequency of a boomwhacker’s tone.