Real-time Qualification of Percussive Sounds Based on Correspondences Between Schaeffer’s Solfège and Low-level Audio Descriptors

• Sérgio Freire Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• José Henrique Padovani Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Caio Campos Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbcm.2021.19429

Resumo

Pierre Schaeffers typomorphology (1966) proposes seven criteria of musical perception for the qualification of sound objects, which form the basis of his musical theory. This Solfège fits well into contexts where pitch is not the dominant dimension. Relying on similarities between the practice of reduced listening and the utilization of low-level audio descriptors, we present the first version of a real-time setup in which these descriptors are applied to qualify percussive sounds. The paper describes the tools and strategies used for addressing different criteria: envelope followers with different window sizes and filtering; detection of transients and amplitude modulations; extraction and counting of spectral components; estimation of intrinsic dissonance and spectral distribution; among others. The extracted data is subjected to simple statistical analysis, producing scalar values associated with each segmented object. Finally, we present a variety of examples.

Palavras-chave: Digital Sound Processing, Music Information Retrieval, Realtime Interactive Systems

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