Re: frequency to mel formula

["James W. Beauchamp" <jwbeauch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Good sleuthing, Dick! You've apparently answered the question I
asked in July, 2009 about where the mel scale formula given on 
Wikipedia, namely

mel = log(1 + fr/700)*1127, 

came from. It was credited to Douglas O'Shaughnessy's 1978 book, 
but since O'Shaughnessy didn't remember where he got it, while
at the same time his book seemed to be the primary reference,
it was a mystery as to who the original author of the formula was.

I needed the reference in conjunction with a paper on using MFCC's
for analyzing musical sounds using on some existing software that
did not give references for its formulas. There was also a rumor 
that the mel-frequency formula was originally used for MFCC 
analysis of speech by some speech researchers in Japan. So it's 
good to have a solid reference, but it's probably too late for the 
paper we were working on, where O'Shaughnessy's book was the only 
thing we had to go by.

Jim

Original message:
>From: "Richard F. Lyon" <DickLyon@xxxxxxx>
>Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 11:59:37 -0800
>To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re: [AUDITORY] frequency to mel formula
>
>I've done a bit more looking for where these guys got their formulae:
>
>At 3:55 PM -0400 7/15/09, Dan Ellis wrote:
>>I think Fant is the more appropriate reference (for log(1+f/1000)) and
>>O'Shaugnessy for log(1+f/700).
>
>The "700" version appears in a couple of papers
>before O'Shaughnessy's book, and he tells me that
>got it from some place that he can't recall, but
>definitely did not make it up himself.  Here are
>the two that I've found:
>
>Ananthapadmanabha, T. V. (1980) "Formant ratios
>on mel scale for male/female and male/child
>speakers", Acoustics Letters, UK, vol 4.
>
>and
>
>John Makhoul and Lynn Cosell (1976) "LPCW: An LPC
>Vocoder with Linear Predictive Spectral Warping"
>ICASSP'76 466-469.
>
>It appears that Makhoul may have made it up to
>fit (and Doug says he was at that ICASSP, so that
>may be where he got it). John Makhoul says in
>that paper:
>
>>This relation is similar to those of critical
>>band masking effects and equal intelligibility
>>curves [8]. The mel-frequency relation can be
>>approximated by the following equation
>>
>>   m = 2595 log10(1 + f/700)
>>
>>where f is the frequency in Hz and m is the
>>pitch in mels. The mel scale is adjusted such
>>that m=1000 mels corresponds to f10OO Hz.
>
>In response to my inquiry, John reviewed his notes and said:
>
>>... In my notes, I have pasted a copy of Fig. 48 from The Speech
>>Chain by Peter Denes, which shows the plot of mel scale versus
>>frequency.  I remember distinctly reading off the mel values from that
>>plot because Denes did not include a table of values in his book.  I
>>also remember that earlier formulas divided f by 1000, after Fant.  I
>>have the equation with f divided by 700 in my notebook, along with a
>>hand-drawn plot of the mel scale versus frequency (with values taken
>>from the Denes plot) and the comment: "This equation is almost a
>>perfect fit to the above curve."  I frankly do not remember if I came
>>up with the 700 number or I got it from somewhere else.  But, if I had
>>gotten it from somewhere else, why didn't I reference that work?
>>After all, I reference other things related to it.  My guess is that I
>>must have tried a few values and found 700 to give the best visual
>>fit.
>
>(one may wonder why at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman,
>he had to read values off a plot instead of using
>Beranek's 1949 table, but that's how life was
>before Google)
>
>This makes perfect sense, since the 700 fits
>better than the 1000, even for the tabulated data
>from Berakek that Fant lists in his 1959 paper,
>which is the likely source of Denes's plot.  The
>1000 Hz fits better if the domain is restricted
>to 4 kHz on the high end, but 700 Hz fits better
>overall if the full range is considered, as was
>illustrated in the plot that I sent around before:
>http://dicklyon.com/tech/Hearing/Mel-like_scales.svg
>
>The Denes plot can be seen here (later edition, presumably same plot):
>http://books.google.com/books?id=ZMTm3nlDfroC&pg=PA104
>It only goes up to 10,000 Hz, which is 3000 mel.
>Makhoul's 700 Hz formula goes right through that
>point.
>
>As for Fant and the 1000 Hz version, he cites his
>own 1949 paper in Swedish, saying "This formula,
>discussed in more detail earlier (Fant, 1949), is
>a better approximation than the Koenig scale..."
>This line is found in his 1959 paper, which is
>what's reprinted in the usually cited 1973 book:
>
>G. Fant, "Acoustic description and classification
>of phonetic units", Ericsson Technics, No. 1, 1959
>reprinted in G. Fant, Speech Sounds and Features,
>MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1973, pp. 32-83
>
>Dan Ellis had pointed out the 1973 book's
>reference to the 1949 Swedish source, and had
>pointed out Davis & Mermelstein (1980)'s
>reference to Fant's 1959 English paper, but seems
>to have missed, as I had, the fact that the 1973
>book chapter was a reprint of that 1959 paper.
>Steve Greenberg just pointed that out to me this
>weekend.  It's easy to miss the small note at the
>bottom of the first page of the book chapter.
>
>There's also a mel formula with 625 Hz offset
>(expressed as the reciprocal, 1.6e-3 s), a good
>fit to the full 14000 Hz of Beranek's data table,
>in Lindsay and Norman, 1977:
>
>  "mels = 2410 log (1.6x10^{-3} f + 1)"
>
>Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology
>Peter H. Lindsay and Donald A. Norman
>Edition	2
>Academic Press, 1977
>http://books.google.com/books?id=6d9OAAAAMAAJ&q=%22mels+2410+log%22
>(I haven't checked first edition)
>
>the same is also in
>Sensation and Perception
>Stanley Coren, Clare Porac, and Lawrence M. Ward
>Academic Press, 1979
>http://books.google.com/books?id=AN9qAAAAMAAJ&q=%22mels+2410+log%22
>
>This suggests that Makhoul's 700 Hz was not yet
>widely known and used in the late 1970s (not
>surprisingly, as it was only in an ICASSP paper,
>not likely noticed in the psychology field), and
>that others were fitting similar values, finding
>Fant's 1000 Hz unsatisfactory, perhaps.  I'll Don
>Norman what he recalls.
>
>I'd still like to see that 1949 paper (or perhaps
>it's a book, at 139 pages).  I've asked the
>National Library of Sweden, who have a copy, if
>they can make me a copy, but it seems unlikely.
>Anyone in Stockholm want to go take a look?
>
>In the mean time, it seems reasonable to cite
>Fant 1959 or 1949 as the source of the first mel
>formula, and Makhoul 1976 as the source of the
>modern 700 Hz version.  I'll update wikipedia.
>
>Of course, this is just for the formulas.  As
>Jont Allen points out, Fletcher and Munson had
>plots of all this in 1937 in JASA, but didn't
>name it like Stevens did.  And as Don Greenwood
>points out, the data are all seriously flawed,
>and a better formula is one with an offset of 165
>Hz (for a human cochlea map), or as Glasberg and
>Moore point out, 228 Hz for an ERB-rate scale.
>
>Dick