Peter L. Schuck
Acoust. and Signal Processing, Inst. for Microstructural Sci., Nat. Res. Council, Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6, Canada
Various time frequency distributions including spectrograms, Wigner distributions and smoothings thereof, and more recently scalograms, have been used to analyze speech. Very little work has been presented on attempts to use these methods to study sound reproduction, that is, loudspeaker/listening room systems. The loudspeaker/room system alters the reproduced sound mainly through resonances, delayed resonances, and reflections. The wavelet transform offers another potential avenue to visualize loudspeaker/room interaction with the highly desirable property that it is ``constant Q'' or constant percentage bandwidth as opposed to the other transforms that are constant bandwidth. Visual displays of the scalogram or squared modulus of the continuous wavelet transform are presented of resonances, delayed resonances, and echoes at, above, and below the threshold of audibility. In this way, the viability of the scalogram as a tool for the analysis of loudspeaker/room interactions is explored.