Modelling the Microphone-Related Timbral Brightness of Recorded Signals

Abstract

Brightness is one of the most common timbral descriptors used for searching audio databases, and is also the timbral attribute of recorded sound that is most affected by microphone choice, making a brightness prediction model desirable for automatic metadata generation. A model, sensitive to microphone-related as well as source-related brightness, was developed based on a novel combination of the spectral centroid and the ratio of the total magnitude of the signal above 500 Hz to that of the full signal. This model performed well on training data (r = 0.922). Validating it on new data showed a slight gradient error but good linear correlation across source types and overall (r = 0.955). On both training and validation data, the new model out-performed metrics previously used for brightness prediction.