Characterizing Musical Signals with Wigner-Ville Interferences

This paper presents a new characterization of musical signals which may lead to better understanding about how such signals are perceived. We first consider some signal analysis methods which facilitate measures of perceived qualities of music. More precisely, we consider a particular representation of signal energy on which to base a quantitative measure of sensory dissonance. After defining sensory dissonance in section 2.1, we describe a well known signal decomposition method, the matching pursuit. Thereafter, we consider one aspect of signal energy which has been largely ignored in the literature – the Wigner-Ville interferences. We explain why and how these interferences can be used as the basis for a dissonance characterization of a musical signal.