In sixth century BC, Pythagoras discovered the mathematical foundation of musical consonance and dissonance. When auditory frequencies in small-integer ratios are combined, the result is a harmonious perception. In contrast, most frequency combinations result in audible, off-centered by-products labeled “beating” or “roughness;” these are reported by most listeners to sound dissonant. In this p...

The demand for trombone-players, for what are called ‘jazz’ bands, has not only made it difficult to keep them in symphony orchestras, but it is destroying their artistic efficiency. The principal characteristic of ‘jazz’ music is the vulgar sliding from tone to tone.... This plays havoc with the embouchure of the musician, and, if persisted in, inevitably unfits him for artistic music.... It i...

We present Vibrato Nonnegative Tensor Factorization, an algorithm for single-channel unsupervised audio source separation with an application to separating instrumental or vocal sources with nonstationary pitch from music recordings. Our approach extends Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for audio modeling by including local estimates of frequency modulation as cues in the separation. This permi...

Black-capped Chickadee (Parus atricapillus) song consists of two notes, termed fee and bee. Frequency measures at three key points (at the start and end offee, and at the start of bee) were obtained from the songs of a large sample of chickadees (n = 15 1) in the wild. In this sample, 19 birds produced songs shifted downward in frequency as well as their normal songs. Analysis of normal song re...

The constant Q transform described recently [J. C. Brown and M. S. Puckette, "An efficient algorithm for the calculation of a constant Q transform," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 92, 2698-2701 (1992}] has been adapted so that it is suitable for tracking the fundamental frequency of extremely rapid musical passages. For this purpose the calculation described previously has been modified so that it is cons...

We show how the axiomatic structure of scale-space theory can be applied to the auditory domain and be used for deriving idealized models of auditory receptive fields via scale-space principles. For defining a time-frequency transformation of a purely temporal signal, it is shown that the scale-space framework allows for a new way of deriving the Gabor and Gammatone filters as well as a novel f...

This paper is an attempt to solve two problems related to musical acoustics. The first one consists in defining a signature of an instrument, namely, summarizing its vibroacoustical behavior. The second one deals with the existing relationship between the musical sound and the vibroacoustic properties of the instrument body. The violin is the application of this paper. A proposed solution for t...

Clarinettists combine non-standard fingerings with particular vocal tract configurations to achieve pitch bending, i.e., sounding pitches that can deviate substantially from those of standard fingerings. Impedance spectra were measured in the mouth of expert clarinettists while they played normally and during pitch bending, using a measurement head incorporated within a functioning clarinet mou...

Many people exposed to sinewave analogues of speech first report hearing them as electronic glissando and, later, when they switch into a 'speech mode', hearing them as syllables. This perceptual switch modifies their discrimination abilities, enhancing perception of differences that cross phonemic boundaries while diminishing perception of differences within phonemic categories. Using high-den...

Sentence intonation of spontaneous French spoken in Mauritius and Reunion Island presents intriguing similarities. In both varieties, the realization of the so-called continuation majeure present sharp melodic rises with glissando values exceeding 70 semitones/s, whereas values below 40 semitones/s are generally found in most other varieties of French. This similarity exists despite the fact th...