Harmonics Based Representation in Clarinet Tone Quality Evaluation

Abstract

Music tone quality evaluation is generally performed by experts. It could be subjective and short of consistency and fairness as well as time-consuming. In this paper we present a new method for identifying the clarinet reed quality by evaluating tone quality based on the harmonic structure and energy distribution. We first decouple the quality of reed and clarinet pipe based on the acoustic harmonics, and discover that the reed quality is strongly relevant to the even parts of the harmonics. Then we construct a features set consisting of the even harmonic envelope and the energy distribution of harmonics in spectrum. The annotated clarinet audio data are recorded from 3 levels of performers and the tone quality is classified by machine learning. The results show that our new method for identifying low and medium high tones significantly outperforms previous methods.

Archives of Acoustics

“…where ∆ is the difference operator, t is time, and h is the interval between x(t) and x(t + h) for a digitally sampled signal h = 1 f s , where f s is the sampling frequency (Wang et al, 2020). The element x[n] at the time point n in a spectrogram can be defined as follows (Haykin, Van Veen, 1998):…”

Evaluations of Clarinet Sound Quality and Register Characteristics

“…This research used traditional methods such as frequency modulation, wavetable interpolation, and nonlinear filtering synthesis to solve the problems of spectral modeling and timbre blending in computer music. In their analysis of clarinet reeds and sound quality, Wang, Guan, and Du employed a new method based on harmonic structure and energy distribution to assess clarinet reed quality [8]. The researchers discovered that reed quality is closely linked to even-numbered harmonics by separating the reed and clarinet mass.…”