On Jun 22, 2006, at 12:36 PM, Malcolm Slaney wrote:
On Jun 21, 2006, at 2:54 AM, Olivier Tache wrote:
I have read a number of "classical" papers about MDS and auditory
dissimilarity (by Gordon&Grey, Grey&Moorer, Wessel) (and was wondering
if such experiments were still carried out).
I think the Gray/Wessel approach has failed..
Failed at what? Malcolm, I think you have missed the point. My
original goal in the early 70's was to develop representations of
musical material that would help me reason about the composition of
timbre sequences known as klangfarbenmelodies. In one of my early
papers ( http://xenakis.ircam.fr/articles/textes/Wessel78a/ ), I
demonstrate that one can obtain interpretable geometric representations
of musically useful timbres and that such "timbre spaces" can be used
to make predictions about the behavior of timbre sequences. Hardly a
failure! Grey and Gordon demonstrated how such MDS spaces can be used
to make interesting timbral interpolations or hybrid instrument
sounds. Recently, I've taken a new look at the timbre space
representations obtained by myself, Grey, McAdams, Wedin and Goude and
am struck by how well Les Atlas's Modulation Spectrum describes what is
a common feature of many of the 2-D spaces wherein one of the
dimensions is related to the spectral envelope and the other the
temporal envelope.
I have no objection to your and Terasawa's approach of testing a pre-
ordained model such as one based on MFCC's. However, such tests should
be carried out in a direct manner as suggested by Krantz and Tversky in
their work on the foundations of the geometric representation of
perceptual data (see Suppes, Krantz, Luce, & Tversky's Foundations of
Measurement Vol 2). I doubt that MFCC's will pass the straightforward
qualitative test of "interdimensional additivity" essential to a
geometric representation.
David Wessel
"The spectrum is not an interesting steady date." she said as I was
enveloped.
it's too hard to figure out what the results mean. (Just trying to be
blunt to get your attention. ;-) You start with convenient sounds,
measure perception and then try to figure out what the MDS dimensions
mean. That hasn't worked. I think that is why people have not been
pushing on it very hard lately.
Hiroko Terasawa and I have been taking an opposite approach. We're
*starting* with the dimensions, synthesizing sounds and then measuring
the stress between human perception and the pre-ordained model.
Several papers describing our initial results are online at
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~hiroko/timbre/
Sounds like Jim is doing something in between the two extremes.
- Malcolm