Separation of Transient Information in Musical Audio Using Multiresolution Analysis Techniques

Whilst musical transients are generally acknowledged as holding much of the perceptual information within musical tones, most research in sound analysis and synthesis tends to focus on the steady state components of signals. A method is presented which separates the noisy transient information from the slowly time varying steady state components of musical audio. Improvements of using adaptive thresholding, and multiresolution analysis methods are then illustrated. It is shown that by analyzing the resulting transient information only, current onset detection algorithms can be improved considerably, especially for those instruments with noisy attack information, such as plucked or struck strings. The idea is then applied to audio processing techniques to enhance or decrease the strength of note attack information. Finally, the transient extraction algorithm (TSS) is applied to time-scaling implementation, where the transient and noise information is analyzed so that only steady state regions are stretched, yielding considerably improved results.