Frequency-Zooming ARMA Modeling for Analysis of Noisy String Instrument Tones

This paper addresses model-based analysis of string instrument sounds. In particular, it reviews the application of autoregressive (AR) modeling to sound analysis/synthesis purposes. Moreover, a frequency-zooming autoregressive moving average (FZ-ARMA) modeling scheme is described. The performance of the FZ-ARMA method on modeling the modal behavior of isolated groups of resonance frequencies is evaluated for both synthetic and real string instrument tones immersed in background noise. We demonstrate that the FZ-ARMA modeling is a robust tool to estimate the decay time and frequency of partials of noisy tones. Finally, we discuss the use of the method in synthesis of string instrument sounds.