A Review of Time-Scale Modification of Music Signals

Jonathan Driedger,Meinard Müller

doi:10.3390/app6020057

Jonathan Driedger, Meinard Müller

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/app6020057

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Journal: Applied sciences	Publication Date: Feb 18, 2016
Citations: 74	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

Abstract

Time-scale modification (TSM) is the task of speeding up or slowing down an audio signal’s playback speed without changing its pitch. In digital music production, TSM has become an indispensable tool, which is nowadays integrated in a wide range of music production software. Music signals are diverse—they comprise harmonic, percussive, and transient components, among others. Because of this wide range of acoustic and musical characteristics, there is no single TSM method that can cope with all kinds of audio signals equally well. Our main objective is to foster a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of TSM procedures. To this end, we review fundamental TSM methods, discuss typical challenges, and indicate potential solutions that combine different strategies. In particular, we discuss a fusion approach that involves recent techniques for harmonic-percussive separation along with time-domain and frequency-domain TSM procedures.

Highlights

Time-scale modification (TSM) procedures are digital signal processing methods for stretching or compressing the duration of a given audio signal
Afterwards, we review two conceptually different TSM methods: the time-domain waveform similarity overlap-add (WSOLA) (Section 4) as well as the frequency-domain PV-TSM (Section 5)
We review the state-of-the-art TSM procedure from [8] that improves on the quality of both WSOLA as well as PV-TSM by incorporating harmonic-percussive separation (Section 6)

Summary

Introduction

Time-scale modification (TSM) procedures are digital signal processing methods for stretching or compressing the duration of a given audio signal. The time-scale modified signal should sound as if the original signal’s content was performed at a different tempo while preserving properties like pitch and timbre. TSM procedures are applied in a wide range of scenarios. They simplify the process of creating music remixes. Music producers or DJs apply TSM to adjust the durations of music recordings, enabling synchronous playback [1,2]. A second application scenario is adjusting an audio stream’s duration to that of a given video clip. TSM can be used to synchronize the audio material with the video’s visual content [3]

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion