Detecting piano pedalling techniques in polyphonic music remains a challenging task in music information retrieval. While other piano-related tasks, such as pitch estimation and onset detection, have seen improvement through applying deep learning methods, little work has been done to develop deep learning models to detect playing techniques. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning approach for the detection of sustain-pedal techniques, which are commonly used by pianists to enrich the sound. In the source task, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained for learning spectral and temporal contexts when the sustain pedal is pressed using a large dataset generated by a physical modelling virtual instrument. The CNN is designed and experimented through exploiting the knowledge of piano acoustics and physics. This can achieve an accuracy score of 0.98 in the validation results. In the target task, the knowledge learned from the synthesised data can be transferred to detect the sustain pedal in acoustic piano recordings. A concatenated feature vector using the activations of the trained convolutional layers is extracted from the recordings and classified into frame-wise pedal press or release. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in acoustic piano recordings of Chopins music. From the cross-validation results, the proposed transfer learning method achieves an average F-measure of 0.89 and an overall performance of 0.84 obtained using the micro-averaged F-measure. These results outperform applying the pre-trained CNN model directly or the model with a fine-tuned last layer.
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