Preprocessing for the Automated Transcription of Polyphonic Music: Linking Wavelet Theory and Auditory Filtering

: In this paper a fast method for the calculation of a linear time-frequency distribution based on the gammatone filter auditory model is introduced as a preprocessing step for the automated transcription of music and auditory source separation. Examples show that this method has a promising potential for the analysis of music pieces with a limited spectral overlap of the different signal components. 1 Wavelet Analysis Using Auditory Filters In the past few years wavelet transforms have become an important tool for signal processing. See (Rioul and Vetterli, 1991) for an overview. An important property of both the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is their linearity, which makes them more suitable for the analysis of multicomponent signals than quadratic time-frequency distributions (TFD) suffering from cross-term artefacts. The CWT is given by W s (b; a) = 1 p a Z 1 \Gamma1 s(ø ) \Delta g ` ø \Gamma b a ' dø; a ? 0: (1) For adm..