Abstract:

The method of principal component analysis, which is based on second-order statistics (or linear independence), has long been used for redundancy reduction of audio data. The more recent technique of independent component analysis, enforcing much stricture statistical criteria based on higher-order statistical independence, is introduced and shown to be far superior in separating independent musical sources. This theory has been applied to piano trills and a databse of trill rates was assembled from experiments with a computer-driven piano, recordings of a professional pianist, and commercially available compact disks. The method of independent component analysis has thus been shown to be an outstanding, effiective means of automatically extracting interesting musical information from a sea of redundant data.