Perception

Here, I focus on how we can analyse, visualize and synthesize sound, or more specifically the timbre of instruments. Pitch and Timbre Perception Our perception of music is based on the grouping of frequencies in time and space. That is why a set of frequencies can be heard as a specific tone with an associated pitch, loudness and timbre. Such grouping is done by relating frequencies that have their origin close in spatial location, have similar onset time, and move in the same direction. The problem, however, is that there are no computational tools that can do this in an immediate and straight forward way like the human brain. ...

For my thesis, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of “salience”. According to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, salience comes from the Latin word salire that means to leap. The word is used with many connotations in different subjects, but generally it is related to something prominent or significant. Mathematical studies use salience as a term to describe a sudden change in the derivative of a function, as for example in (Large and Palmer 2002). ...