A Wavelet-Based Method for the Estimation of Clarity of Attack Parameters in Non-Percussive Instruments
From the exploration of databases of instrument sounds to the selfassisted practice of musical instruments, methods for automatically
and objectively assessing the quality of musical tones are in high
demand. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm for estimating
the duration of the attack, with particular attention to wind and
bowed string instruments. In fact, for these instruments, the quality
of the tones is highly influenced by the attack clarity, for which,
together with pitch stability, the attack duration is an indicator often
used by teachers by ear. Since the direct estimation of the attack
duration from sounds is made difficult by the initial preponderance of the excitation noise, we propose a more robust approach
based on the separation of the ensemble of the harmonics from the
excitation noise, which is obtained by means of an improved pitchsynchronous wavelet transform. We also define a new parameter,
the noise ducking time, which is relevant for detecting the extent of
the noise component in the attack. In addition to the exploration of
available sound databases, for testing our algorithm, we created an
annotated data set in which several problematic sounds are included.
Moreover, to check the consistency and robustness of our duration
estimates, we applied our algorithm to sets of synthetic sounds with
noisy attacks of programmable duration.