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.