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arXiv · 2609.18999

Variable-Rate Harmonic-Percussive Time-Scale Modification with Real-Time Playback in Python

Sayema Lubis·Clark Peng·Jared Carreño·TJ Tsai
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Abstract

Time-scale modification (TSM) has a number of open-source implementations, but these are designed almost exclusively for offline use, in which a recording is processed at a fixed rate and written out ahead of time. Applications such as automatic musical accompaniment require a different setting, which we call variable-rate playback: the recording to be stretched is known in advance, but the playback rate is not, and must change continuously in response to a live performer. The few implementations that generate output in real time are written in C++ and optimized for speed rather than for ease of modification, experimentation, and integration with the primarily Python-based research ecosystem. This paper describes a Python implementation of the widely used harmonic-percussive TSM method for the variable-rate playback setting. Harmonic-percussive separation is performed offline as a preprocessing step on the known input recording, while synthesis and playback are carried out in real time with a time-scale factor that may change at every frame. We further propose a family of variants that reduce runtime by replacing the phase vocoder's analysis-stage FFT and instantaneous frequency calculations with lookups into precomputed tables. Subjective listening tests with 24 participants (1114 pairwise ratings) show that these approximations become perceptually indistinguishable from the exact implementation once the precomputed hop size is sufficiently small, while reducing total runtime by roughly half. We characterize the resulting tradeoffs among precomputation, runtime, memory, and perceptual quality to guide algorithm selection, and we release our implementation as an open-source package.

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Sayema Lubis, Clark Peng, Jared Carreño, TJ Tsai. 2026-07-20. Variable-Rate Harmonic-Percussive Time-Scale Modification with Real-Time Playback in Python. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18999

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