An efficient musical accompaniment parallel system for mobile devices

This work presents a software system designed to track the reproduction of a musical piece with the aim to match the score position into its symbolic representation on a digital sheet. Into this system, known as automated musical accompaniment system, the process of score alignment can be carried out real-time. A real-time score alignment, also known as score following, poses an important challenge due to the large amount of computation needed to process each digital frame and the very small time slot to process it. Moreover, the challenge is even greater since we are interested on handheld devices, i.e. devices characterized by both low power consumption and mobility. The results presented here show that it is possible to exploit efficiently several cores of an ARM ® processor, or a GPU accelerator (presented in some SoCs from NVIDIA) reducing the processing time per frame under 10 ms in most of the cases.