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SOL and Spectral Profiles of Instruments

Orchidea
#1

Hi,

Either from a Tristan Murail lecture or interview — I can’t remember exactly which, — I read about David Wessel’s Fourier analyses of (the sounding notes of) several instruments while he was at IRCAM. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find traces of a database of these analyses anywhere.

This said, I then remembered that Orchids included a SOL database explorer of its audio descriptors, but I can’t remember if these included spectral/frequency profiles… Is there such a database of instruments’ spectral/frequency profiles of SOL or TinySOL available somewhere, somehow? Or even, are there any other such databases currently available?

Here’s an example of what I’m referring to as “spectral/frequency profile”:

screenshot%2011
screenshot 11.jpg2466×2014 780 KB

The example above was taken from a 2012 article, here: Music in Our Ears…

Any hints or insights on this issue would be most welcome.

All the best,
António

#2

Hi,

we are going to release SOL under our new licence so you will be free then to compute any descriptors you want. Of course you can use those pre-computed for Orchids, but one can also use other Ircamdescriptors for instance to describe temporal features. Finally, think about Audiosculpt to produce nice visualisation of the spectral enveloppe…

Coming soon

2 Likes
#3

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your input. My question was specifically about the “spectral/frequency profiles” (the harmonic peaks of FTs in the frequency domain, as it can be seen in the top right corner of the picture I shared above) of SOL and TinySOL. I know these were needed in order to compute several “spectral shape” descriptors available with Orchids, but I can’t remember if the harmonic peaks themselves were available.

I can always batch-process whole sample libraries and extract the information and save it in SDIF format, either through AudioSculpt or OpenMusic, but I really wish I didn’t have to go that route.

All the best,
António

#4

Hi Greg,

I was so full-on with the question I raised, that the good news you were giving didn’t actually blip on my radar. Those are great news about SOL, Greg, thank you — I actually remember a few years back, right after Orchids’ first launch, having asked Philippe Esling about this exact thing.

Happy new year, everyone.

All the best,
António