Musical Signal Analysis Using Fractional-delay Inverse Comb Filters

A novel filter configuration for the analysis of harmonic musical signals is proposed. The method is based on inverse comb filtering that allows for the extraction of selected harmonic components or the background noise component between the harmonic spectral components. A highly accurate delay required in the inverse comb filter is implemented with a high-order allpass filter. The paper shows that the filter is easy to design, efficient to implement, and it enables accurate low-level feature analysis of musical tones. We describe several case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach: isolating a single partial from a synthetic signal, analyzing the even-to-odd ratio of harmonics in a clarinet tone, and extracting the residual from a bowed string tone.