Wow, onsets are very interesting

My algorithm is working a treat so far. My previous post regarding the onset characteristics of the Double Bass was touching on an important attribute of music instruments. As I go along through the instrument families, the onset characteristics of the instruments are plain to see.

For example, taking the IOWA sample for the Viola:



Note the sharp onset for the Viola. Of course, the importance of onsets in musical instrument recognition has been well documented in the literature so this is no great discovery. However, it is very interesting when one sees the characteristics for themselves through their own work.

Some papers which have studied onset detection and musical instrument recognition:

• Kitahara et al 2006 Instrogram - A New Musical Instrument Recognition Technique Without Using Onset Detection NOR F0 Estimation
• Bello, J.P. et al. 2004 - On the use of phase and energy for musical onset detection in the complex domain
• Bello, J.P. et al. 2005 - A Tutorial on Onset Detection in Music Signals
• Dixon, S. 2006 - Onset Detection Revisited
• Duxbury, C., Bello, J.P., Davies, M., Sandler, M. 2003 - A combined phase and amplitude based approach to onset detecion for audio segmentation
• Duxbury, C., Bello, J.P., Davies, M., Sandler, M. 2003 - Complex Domain Onset Detection for Musical Signals
• Lacoste, A., Douglas, E. 2006 - Machine Learning for Note Onset Detection
• Lacoste, A., Eck, D. 2005 - A Supervised Classification Algorithm for Note Onset Detection
• Leveau, P. ISMIR 2004 - Methodology and tools for the evaluation of automatic onset detection algorithms in music