Harshness (also called raucousness), in
music information retrieval
Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. Those involved in MIR may have a background in academic musicology, psychoacoustics, psychology, signal processing, informatics, machine lear ...
, is a Non-Contextual Low-Level Audio Descriptors (NLDs) that represents one dimension of the multi-dimensional
psychoacoustic feature called as musical
timbre
In music, timbre (), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instrument ...
.
Classical timbre’ NLDs are
roughness,
spectral centroid The spectral centroid is a measure used in digital signal processing to characterise a spectrum. It indicates where the center of mass
In physics, the center of mass of a distribution of mass in space (sometimes referred to as the barycenter o ...
, and
spectral flux. While harmonicity and inharmonicity can also be considered NLDs, harshness differs from them, as well as from roughness, once it reckons for a distinguished perceptual audio feature expressed by the summary spectral periodicity. This feature is especially clear in single-
pitch, single-
note
Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to:
Music and entertainment
* Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music
* ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian
* ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened versi ...
, musical audio, where the timbre of two different musical instruments can greatly differ in levels of harshness (e.g., the difference in harshness between a flute and a saxophone is evident). As it is supposed to be, harshness is independent of all others NLDs.
Musicology
Music technology
Music information retrieval