It is common practice to map the frequency content of music onto a chroma representation, but there exist many different schemes for constructing such a representation. In this paper, a new scheme is proposed. It comprises a detection of salient frequencies, a conversion of salient frequencies to notes, a psychophysically motivated weighting of harmonics in support of a note, a restriction of harmonic relations between different notes and a restriction of the deviations from a predefined pitch scale (e.g. the equally tempered western scale). A large-scale experimental evaluation has confirmed that the novel chroma representation more closely matches manual chord labels than the representations generated by six other tested schemes. Therefore, the new chroma representation is expected to improve applications such as song similarity matching and chord detection and labeling.
展开▼
