Download Timbre-Constrained Recursive Time-Varying Analysis for Musical Note Separation
Note separation in music signal processing becomes difficult when there are overlapping partials from co-existing notes produced by either the same or different musical instruments. In order to deal with this problem, it is necessary to involve certain invariant features of musical instrument sounds into the separation processing. For example, the timbre of a note of a musical instrument may be used as one possible invariant feature. In this paper, a timbre estimate is used to represent this feature such that it becomes a constraint when note separation is performed on a mixture signal. To demonstrate the proposed method, a timedependent recursive regularization analysis is employed. Spectral envelopes of different notes are estimated and a modified parameter update strategy is applied to the recursive regularization process. The experiment results show that the flaws due to the overlapping partial problem can be effectively reduced through the proposed approach.
Download Analysis and Synthesis of the Violin Playing Style of Heifetz and Oistrakh
The same music composition can be performed in different ways, and the differences in performance aspects can strongly change the expression and character of the music. Experienced musicians tend to have their own performance style, which reflects their personality, attitudes and beliefs. In this paper, we present a datadriven analysis of the performance style of two master violinists, Jascha Heifetz and David Fyodorovich Oistrakh to find out their differences. Specifically, from 26 gramophone recordings of each of these two violinists, we compute features characterizing performance aspects including articulation, energy, and vibrato, and then compare their style in terms of the accents and legato groups of the music. Based on our findings, we propose algorithms to synthesize violin audio solo recordings of these two masters from scores, for music compositions that we either have or have not observed in the analysis stage. To our best knowledge, this study represents the first attempt that computationally analyzes and synthesizes the playing style of master violinists.