Complex Domain Onset Detection for Musical Signals

We present a novel method for onset detection in musical signals. It improves over previous energy-based and phase-based approaches by combining both types of information in the complex domain. It generates a detection function that is sharp at the position of onsets and smooth everywhere else. Results on a handlabelled data-set show that high detection rates can be achieved at very low error rates. The approach is more robust than its predecessors both theoretically and practically.