Aww. I read this title as Beat Detection-Algorithms, hoping it would help with some gray-hat marketing we've been doing.<p>Still interesting though.
I wrote my own algorithm for my video editor Vix, which takes a song and then automatically edits videos to the beats it finds.<p>Sound energy algorithm is not very good imho.<p>Low pass is a step in the right direction, but I've found a combo of low pass and band pass to be more accurate.<p>Here's a vid of Vix in action:<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/90104152" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/90104152</a>
The topic sounds interesting, but I can't tell whether the interesting part is supposed to be the preprocessing, I.e. going from a raw music file to some sort of binary vector, or the actual beat detection, which could ostensibly work on any binary vector. Wouldn't one just do a Fourier transform for the second part?
I still believe the best option for accuracy is actual instrument/voice recognition. Might however not be the fastest or easiest. Also I'm not sure if it's out there already or not.