(Form left to right: Peter Desain, Henkjan Honing, Masataka Goto, Takebumi Itagaki, Ed Large)
In 1993 an Email platform was initiated to bring together the different approaches to modeling beat induction and tempo tracking. This area is a good example of a simple cognitive task (tapping the beat with your foot while listening to the music) that is quite hard to model. But the attempt to model this process computationally can shed more light on the problem. The intention is to see what different methods are proposed. The focus was on practical models and methods that can eventually be used for real-time interactive composition (but all theoretical or empirical contributions were welcomed too). There are a number of aspects that make beat induction a non-trivial process to model. This might be reflected in the large body of work on the subject and the diversity of computational formalisms used.
To visualize the problem for a broader audience and to attract attention to this domain of research a mechanical shoe was built that can tap a beat, controlled by the different systems. This shoe was used in a special session on foot-tapping at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Århus, Denmark in september 1994.
(Form left to right: Peter Desain, Henkjan Honing, Masataka Goto, Takebumi Itagaki, Ed Large)