Validating Attack Phase Descriptors Obtained by the Timbre Toolbox and MIRtoolbox
Year: 2017
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The attack phase of sound events plays an important role in how sounds and music are perceived. Several approaches have been suggested for locating salient time points and critical time spans within the attack portion of a sound, and some have been made widely accessible to the research community in toolboxes for Matlab. While some work exists where proposed audio descriptors are grounded in listening tests, the approaches used in two of the most popular toolboxes for musical analysis have not been thoroughly compared against perceptual results. This article evaluates the calculation of attack phase descriptors in the Timbre toolbox and the MIRtoolbox by comparing their predictions to empirical results from a listening test. The results show that the default parameters in both toolboxes give inaccurate predictions for the sound stimuli in our experiment. We apply a grid search algorithm to obtain alternative parameter settings for these toolboxes that align their estimations with our empirical results.\nAn erratum dated 15 December 2017 is uploaded as a second file to this article.
Authors: Kristian Nymoen, Anne Danielsen, Justin London
Language: English
Topic: Music and Audio Processing
Subfield: Signal Processing
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2737675423