Onset refers to the beginning of a

musical note In music, a note is the representation of a musical sound. Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class. Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretizatio ...

or other sound. It is related to (but different from) the concept of a transient: all musical notes have an onset, but do not necessarily include an initial transient.

Onset detection

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as sound, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniques are used to optimize transmissions, ...

, onset detection is an active research area. For example, the

MIREX Mirex was an organochloride that was commercialized as an insecticide and later banned because of its impact on the environment. This white crystalline odorless solid is a derivative of cyclopentadiene. It was popularized to control fire ants b ...

annual competition features a
Audio Onset Detection contest
Approaches to onset detection can operate in the

time domain Time domain refers to the analysis of mathematical functions, physical signals or time series of economic or environmental data, with respect to time. In the time domain, the signal or function's value is known for all real numbers, for the c ...

frequency domain In physics, electronics, control systems engineering, and statistics, the frequency domain refers to the analysis of mathematical functions or signals with respect to frequency, rather than time. Put simply, a time-domain graph shows how a s ...

phase Phase or phases may refer to: Science *State of matter, or phase, one of the distinct forms in which matter can exist *Phase (matter), a region of space throughout which all physical properties are essentially uniform * Phase space, a mathematic ...

domain, or complex domain, and include looking for: * Increases in spectral energy * Changes in spectral energy distribution (

spectral flux Spectral flux is a measure of how quickly the power spectrum of a signal is changing, calculated by comparing the power spectrum for one frame against the power spectrum from the previous frame. More precisely, it is usually calculated as the L ...

) or

* Changes in detected pitch - e.g. using a polyphonic

pitch detection algorithm Pitch may refer to: Acoustic frequency * Pitch (music), the perceived frequency of sound including "definite pitch" and "indefinite pitch" ** Absolute pitch or "perfect pitch" ** Pitch class, a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octav ...

* Spectral patterns recognisable by

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

techniques such as neural networks. Simpler techniques such as detecting increases in time-domain amplitude can typically lead to an unsatisfactorily high amount of

false positive A false positive is an error in binary classification in which a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition (such as a disease when the disease is not present), while a false negative is the opposite error, where the test resul ...

s or

false negative A false positive is an error in binary classification in which a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition (such as a disease when the disease is not present), while a false negative is the opposite error, where the test resul ...

s. The aim is often to judge onsets similarly to how a human would: so psychoacoustically-motivated strategies may be employed. Sometimes the onset detector can be restricted to a particular domain (depending on intended application), for example being targeted at detecting percussive onsets. With a narrower focus, it can be more straightforward to obtain reliable detection.

References

* Bello, J.P., Daudet, L., Abdallah, S., Duxbury, C., Davies, M., Sandler, M.B. (2005
"A Tutorial on Onset Detection in Music Signals"
IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing 13(5), pp 1035–1047 * Bello, J.P, Duxbury, C., Davies, M., Sandler, M. (2004)
"On the use of phase and energy for musical onset detection in the complex domain"
''IEEE Signal Processing Letters'' * Collins, N. (2005
"A Comparison of Sound Onset Detection Algorithms with Emphasis on Psychoacoustically Motivated Detection Functions"
Proceedings of AES118 Convention Psychoacoustics Synthesizers {{signal-processing-stub

Onset detection

See also

References