AES E-Library

Evaluation of Mel-Band and MFCC-Based Error Metrics for Correspondence to Discrimination of Spectrally Altered Musical Instrument Sounds

An objective measure of the subjective timbral difference between two musical sounds is a difficult problem. Mel-band-based metrics and single mel-frequency ceptral coefficient were considered as a way of improving results obtained from previous methods based on harmonic and critical-band error metrics. Results indicate that timbral discrimination is determined by the first 5 to 10 harmonics rather than the broad spectral envelope. More sophisticated methods do not offer significant advantage.

Authors: Horner, Andrew B.; Beauchamp, James W.; So, Richard H. Y
Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong; School and Music and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA; Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong(See document for exact affiliation information.)
JAES Volume 59 Issue 5 pp. 290-303; May 2011 Import into BibTeX

Click to purchase paper or login as an AES member. If your company or school subscribes to the AES Journal then you can look for this paper in the institutional version of the Online Journal. If you are not an AES member and would like to subscribe to the E-Library then Join the AES!

This paper costs $20 for non-members, $5 for AES members and is free for E-Library subscribers.

Learn more about the AES E-Library

E-Library Location: (CD JAES59)   /jaes59/5/pg290.pdf

Start a discussion about this paper!