What makes Metal Groove?

Beat tracking, tempo estimation, percussive source separation, and other music analysis tools for rhythm in metal music.

I’m Sevag and I love metal. This page showcases a collection of my loosely-related projects in the pursuit of the analysis of groove and rhythm in metal music. See my open-source portfolio and my personal website for any inquiries.

Motion and percussion-aligned beat tracking

headbang.py: site, repo

Calculating groove from tempo agreement between auditory beat and motion tempo of drummer’s right arm:

Calculating groove from tempo agreement between auditory beat and motion of guitarist’s head:

Motion-aligned beat tracking:

Percussion/onset-aligned beat tracking:

 

Polyrhythmic metronome and a drum machine

Libmetro: site, repo

C++ metronome library for creating arbitrary click tracks with support for polyrhythm and multiple representations, using STK for drum sound synthesis:

Intuitive format for a 5/3 beat:

1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0
1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0

Audio:

A beat given to me by a jazz vibrophonist: 3/5, 5 as a swing pattern

1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1

Audio:

drum_machine (repo): Go wrapper for libmetro to generate metronomes from the rhythm information for songs in the Harmonix Set

 

Beat-driven visual animation on Android

ElectroPARTYogram: repo

Tempo and beat-driven animation in an Android app, powered by BTrack and animated with SFML, with visualization intensity influenced by onset strength:

 

Practice your groove with Music Demixer

“Music Demixer” is a collection of my free and paid websites and Android app that offer high-quality AI-powered stem separation (aka music demixing) that run privately and offline on your devices:

Video showing how I use the app to practice metal (Monuments):

Samples of the high quality stems of the Pro Deluxe model when applied to a Periphery song.

Bass:

Drums:

Vocals:

 

Fake AI metal artist

In 2020, I created 1000sharks.xyz (site, repo), a fake metal band trained on Animals as Leaders and Cannibal Corpse:

sevagh · 1000sharks - AI-generated metal
 

Other source separation and percussion enhancement

While not directly related to metal, groove, or rhythm, isolating the percussion in a song can be a key step in performing further percussion analysis. Besides my “Music Demixer” product, here’s a list of other related projects: