| Abstrakt: |
Timbre is the attribute of sound that makes, for example, two musical instruments playing the same note sound different. It is typically associated with the spectral (but also the temporal) envelope and assumed to be independent from the pitch (but also the loudness) of the sound. This article shows how to design a simple but effective pitch-independent timbre feature, well adapted to musical data, by deriving it from the constant-Q transform (CQT), a log-frequency transform that matches the typical Western musical scale ,. The decomposition of the CQT spectrum into an energy-normalized pitch component and a pitch-normalized spectral component is demonstrated, the latter from which a number of harmonic coefficients are extracted. The discriminative powers of these constant-Q harmonic coefficients (CQHCs) are then evaluated on the NSynth data set , a publicly available, large-scale data set of musical notes, where they are compared with the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) , a feature originally designed for speech recognition but commonly used to characterize timbre in music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
