Temporal analysis, manipulation, and resynthesis of musical vibrato

Abstract

Vibrato is an important music performance technique for both voice and various music instruments. In this paper, a signal processing framework for vibrato analysis, manipulation and resynthesis is presented. In the analysis part, music vibrato is treated as a generalized descriptor of music timbre and the signal magnitude and instantaneous frequency are implemented as temporal features. Specifically, the magnitude track shows the dynamic variations of audio loudness, and the frequency track shows the frequency deviations varying with time. In the manipulation part, several manipulation methods for the magnitude track and the frequency track are implemented. The tracking results are manipulated in both the time- and the frequency-domain. These manipulation methods are implemented as an interactive process to allow musicians to manually adjust the processing parameters. In the resynthesis part, the simulated vibrato audio is created using sinusoidal resynthesis process. The resynthesis part serves three purposes: to imitate human music performance, to migrate sonic features across music performances, and to serve as creative audio design tools, e.g., to create non-existing vibrato characteristics. The source audio from human music performance and the resynthesized audio are compared using subjective listening tests to validate our proposed framework.