Multiresolution time-frequency analysis of polyphonic music

Automatic transcription of polyphonic music is one of the difficult problems in the field of signal processing and analysis. One of the main reasons is that there exists no single scale of time-frequency representation, which is suitable for the detection of the wide range of features present in the musical sounds. The multiresolution Fourier transform (MFT) approach has been investigated, in order to overcome this problem by providing several time-frequency representations using a range of scales. This representation enables more flexibility in the analysis of polyphonic audio signals which requires a good feature separation. Transcription algorithms designed to work on MFT coefficients are shown to have a great potential and good transcription results are achieved for more complicated music performances, than currently possible by other techniques