EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2003 (2003), Issue 10, Pages 953-967
doi:10.1155/S1110865703304020

Frequency-Zooming ARMA Modeling for Analysis of Noisy String Instrument Tones

Paulo A. A. Esquef,1 Matti Karjalainen,1 and Vesa Välimäki1,2

 1Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 3000, Espoo FIN-02015 HUT, Finland
2Pori School of Technology and Economics, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 300, Pori FIN-28101, Finland
Received 31 May 2002; Revised 5 March 2003

Abstract

This paper addresses model-based analysis of string instrument sounds. In particular, it reviews the application of autoregressive (AR) modeling to sound analysis/synthesis purposes. Moreover, a frequency-zooming autoregressive moving average (FZ-ARMA) modeling scheme is described. The performance of the FZ-ARMA method on modeling the modal behavior of isolated groups of resonance frequencies is evaluated for both synthetic and real string instrument tones immersed in background noise. We demonstrate that the FZ-ARMA modeling is a robust tool to estimate the decay time and frequency of partials of noisy tones. Finally, we discuss the use of the method in synthesis of string instrument sounds.