Tonal features of Chinese plucked string instruments extracted from constant-Q transform spectrum

Abstract

The tonal features can demonstrate some musical acoustical characteristics of a musical instrument. The Constant-Q Transform (CQT) transforms temporal signal into logarithmically spaced frequency domain, which suits musical content very well. To analyze the sound of the notes played on Chinese plucked string instruments, this paper proposed an algorithm to draw the chromagram used for extracting tonal features and recorded four Chinese plucked string instruments. The classic brute force method for CQT was employed to produce the spectrograms of notes which were tuned and mapped to obtain the chromagrams. Tonal features were then extracted from them and proved to be informative for analyzing the timbre of Chinese plucked string instruments.