Music Transcription

Residual Shuffle-Exchange Network is an efficient alternative to models using an attention mechanism that allows the modelling of long-range dependencies in sequences in O(n log n) time. This model achieved state-of-the-art performance on the MusicNet dataset for music transcription while being able to run inference on a single GPU fast enough to be suitable for real-time audio processing.

The Beneš block is a computation-efficient alternative to dense attention, enabling the modelling of long-range dependencies in O(n log n) time. In comparison, dense attention which is commonly used in Transformers has O(n^2) complexity. In music, dependencies occur on several scales, including on a coarse scale which requires processing very long sequences. Beneš blocks have been used in Residual Shuffle-Exchange Networks to achieve state-of-the-art results in music transcription. Beneš blocks have a ‘receptive field’ of the size of the whole sequence, and it has no bottleneck. These properties hold for dense attention but have not been shown for many sparse attention and dilated convolutional architectures.