Spectral modeling of musical sounds

Abstract

Spectral based analysis/synthesis techniques offer powerful tools for the processing of sounds. They include many different approaches, each one with its own advantages and set of compromises that have to be considered before using any of them for a particular application. In this article we present several complementary spectral representations, techniques to obtain them or generate sound from them, and a recently developed graphical interface to better explore their capabilities. This paper is part of an ongoing research on spectral based techniques for the analysis and synthesis of musical sounds. Throughout all this work the term Spectral Modeling Synthesis (SMS) has been used to refer to the software implementations that were first done by Xavier Serra and Julius Smith at Stanford University, and more recently by the Music Technology Group of the Audiovisual Institute of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. The goal of this work has been to get general and musically meaningful sound representations based on analysis, from which musical parameters can be manipulated while maintaining high quality sound. These techniques can be used for synthesis, processing and coding applications, while some of the intermediate results might also be applied to other music related problems, e.g., sound source separation, musical acoustics, music perception, or performance analysis.