High Precision Frequency Estimation for Harpsichord Tuning Classification

Submitted by matthiasm on Wed, 07/07/2010 - 08:57.

Publication Type:

Conference Paper

Authors:

Tidhar, D.; Mauch, M.; Dixon, S.

Source:

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Dallas, Texas, USA (2010)

Keywords:

harpsichord; tuning

Abstract:

We present a novel music signal processing task of classifying the
tuning of a harpsichord from audio recordings of standard musical
works. We report the results of a classification experiment involving
six different temperaments, using real harpsichord recordings as well
as synthesised audio data. We introduce the concept of conservative
transcription, and show that existing high-precision pitch estimation
techniques are sufficient for our task if combined with conservative
transcription. In particular, using the CQIFFT algorithm with con-
servative transcription and removal of short duration notes, we are
able to distinguish between 6 different temperaments of harpsichord
recordings with 96% accuracy (100% for synthetic data).