Drum Sound Equalizer INTER:D
- You can control the volume and timbre of drums as you like -

console panel of music player with INTER:D
Abstract

A drum sound equalizer, called INTER:D, is described that enables a listener to control the volume and timbre of bass and snare drum sounds in commercial compact-disc recordings. Although the characteristics of the drum sounds are often closely related to the impression made by a musical piece, conventional graphic equalizers cannot adjust their characteristics because they have volume sliders only for the frequency bands. INTER:D provides drum-specific volume sliders that directly control the frequency components of drum sounds, enabling a listener to intuitively cut or boost the volume of each drum. In addition, INTER:D enables a listener to replace the original timbre of each drum with another timbre selected from a dropdown list. These interactive functions are achieved using an automatic music content analysis system based on low-level audio signal processing. This system can estimate the power spectrogram of each drum sound and detect the onset times in a musical piece. Subjective experiments showed that INTER:D can add a new dimension to the way users experience music.

Motivation

The development of interactive music-playback interfaces has recently been facilitated by the application of low-level audio processing techniques to music content analysis.

INTER:D was invented to meet these demands.

Functions

INTER:D has two functions:

In the future, we plan to apply our proposed equalizing concept to various kinds of instruments.

Samples

We prepared some samples of equalized audio signals, which were compressed in the MP3 format.

piece number cutting volume (-10 [dB])
ORIGINAL CUT_LF CUT_BD CUT_SD
No.7
No.21
No.35
No.47
No.52
piece number boosting volume (+5 [dB])
ORIGINAL BOOST_LF BOOST_BD BOOST_SD
No.7
No.21
No.35
No.47
No.52
piece number changing timbre
ORIGINAL MUTE CHANGE
No.7
No.21
No.35
No.47
No.52

Those popular songs were sampled from RWC Music Database: RWC-MDB-P-2001. Researchers can use the database for research publications and presentations without copyright restrictions.

Videos

We prepared a demo video. Please note that the size of the video file is very large.

MPEG-1 Video (166MB, No.90 "Don't Say Good bye" by Shinya Iguchi)

MPEG-1 Video (22MB, No.90 "Don't Say Good bye" by Shinya Iguchi and "We will rock you" by Queen)

References
Acknowledgments

This research was achieved by using RWC Music Database. We thank everyone who has made this database.


Author : Kazuyoshi Yoshii (AIST)
mail to k.yoshii(at)aist.go.jp

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