Pith. sign in

REVIEW

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1910.10246 v2 pith:KPZECXWW submitted 2019-10-22 cs.SD cs.LGeess.AS

Learning the helix topology of musical pitch

classification cs.SD cs.LGeess.AS
keywords pitchgraphhelixlearningmanifoldmusicalrepresentaddresses
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

To explain the consonance of octaves, music psychologists represent pitch as a helix where azimuth and axial coordinate correspond to pitch class and pitch height respectively. This article addresses the problem of discovering this helical structure from unlabeled audio data. We measure Pearson correlations in the constant-Q transform (CQT) domain to build a K-nearest neighbor graph between frequency subbands. Then, we run the Isomap manifold learning algorithm to represent this graph in a three-dimensional space in which straight lines approximate graph geodesics. Experiments on isolated musical notes demonstrate that the resulting manifold resembles a helix which makes a full turn at every octave. A circular shape is also found in English speech, but not in urban noise. We discuss the impact of various design choices on the visualization: instrumentarium, loudness mapping function, and number of neighbors K.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.