Saxophone fingering identification
Tamara Smyth, Marjan Rouhipour · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2013
The focus of this work is to identify the tonehole configuration or “fingering'' applied by a player during performance, using only the signal recorded at the bell. Because of a player can use alternate fingerings/overblowing to produce a given frequency, detecting the sounding pitch only reduces the possible candidates—it does not produce a unique result. Several recordings of a professional saxophonist playing notes using all fingerings are considered, and several higher level features are explored for distinguishing between a fundamental and an overblown note. In the latter case, it is observed that during the attack portion of the note, the spectral centroid is usually lower, there is greater inharmonicity and increased pitch instability. Combining these heuristics with the detection of subharmonics has yielded excellent results in detecting overblown notes. With the possible fingerings being greatly reduced by this preprocessing, more computationally expensive statistical methods may be employed for a more accurate estimation of the actual fingering applied. To this end, the recorded sound is calibrated to that produced by a reed model coupled to a waveguide that is informed by an acoustic measurement of the player's saxophone configured with each usable fingering.