Harmonics Based Representation in Clarinet Tone Quality Evaluation
This work addresses the need for objective and efficient clarinet tone quality evaluation for musicians and instrument makers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing harmonic analysis techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of subjective and inconsistent clarinet tone quality evaluation by experts by proposing a new method that uses harmonic structure and energy distribution to identify reed quality. The results show that the method significantly outperforms previous methods in identifying low and medium high tones.
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.