Modeling musical instrument tones as dynamic textures

Abstract

In this work we introduce the concept of modeling musical instrument tones as dynamic textures. Dynamic textures are multidimensional signals, which exhibit certain temporal-stationary characteristics such that they can be modeled as observations from a linear dynamical system (LDS). Previous work in dynamic textures research has shown that sequences exhibiting such characteristics can in many cases be re-synthesized by an LDS with high accuracy. In this work we demonstrate that short-time Fourier transform (STFT) coefficients of certain instrument tones (e.g. piano, guitar) can be well-modeled under this requirement. We show that these instruments can be re-synthesized using an LDS model with high fidelity, even using low-dimensional models. In looking to ultimately develop models which can be altered to provide control of pitch and articulation, we analyze the connections between such musical qualities as articulation with linear dynamical system model parameters. Finally, we provide preliminary experiments in the alteration of such musical qualities through model re-parameterization.