Music processing above and below the fundamental frequency

Abstract

Because of the centrality of pitch to music, most music signal processing has been focused on pitch-related timescales, e.g., short-time analysis over 30–50-ms windows. But there is, of course, important information at other scales as well. By looking at ways to model and extract very fine time-scale information one can extract attributes that lead to the perception of ‘‘texture’’ in unpitched instruments such as maracas. At the other extreme, interesting effects can be revealed by investigating the effect of ‘‘modulation-domain’’ processing, such as filtering subband energy envelopes in the 0.1–10-Hz range. A single representation, frequency-domain linear prediction, gives convenient access to both these scales: its use in music analysis/synthesis will be illustrated by examples.