Perceptually Based Pitch Scales in Cepstral Techniques for Percussive Timbre Identification

Different types of cepstral analysis are compared in the context of a percussion instrument classification external for Pd. For raw cepstrum, mel frequency cepstrum, DCT-based cepstrum, and bark frequency cepstrum, various parameter settings are applied to a standardized test. Significant score improvement can be seen when moving from cepstrum to mel cepstrum, and further improvement is achieved using bark cepstrum. Considering the prevalence of MFCCs as a feature vector for timbre, it is suggested that BFCCs are at least as effective, and more appropriate in light of accompanying psychoacoustic research.