Quantifying Spectro-temporal Complexity (Nikolas Alejandro Francis )

Subject: Quantifying Spectro-temporal Complexity
From:    Nikolas Alejandro Francis  <nfu(at)MIT.EDU>
Date:    Wed, 27 Jul 2005 21:25:10 -0400

Hello Everyone,

I just joined this list and look forward to participating in new discussions.

My question is if anyone is aware of a method for quantifying the
spectro-temporal complexity of a set of sounds.  In the past I've moved a
sliding window independently across time and frequency from 0 to the length of
the sound and up to 22khz. For each window I found the standard deviation (SD)
from the mean value within that window, and then averaged all of the SDs for
all frequency and time windows, independently.  For each sound, I found the
mean of all the SDs for frequency and time, resulting in a spectral complexity
value and a temporal complexity value.  Finally I found the mean of these two
values for an overall spectro-temporal complexity value.

Does this sound sufficient?  Thanks.

-Nik Francis