Sound onset detection by applying psychoacoustic knowledge

A system was designed, which is able to detect the perceptual onsets of sounds in acoustic signals. The system is general in regard to the sounds involved and was found to be robust for different kinds of signals. This was achieved without assuming regularities in the positions of the onsets. In this paper, a method is first proposed that can determine the beginnings of sounds that exhibit onset imperfections, i.e., the amplitude envelope of which does not rise monothinically. Then the mentioned system is described, which utilizes band-wise processing and a psychoacoustic model of intensity coding to combine the results from the separate frequency bands. The performance of the system was validated by applying it to the detection of onsets in musical signals ranging from rock to classical and big band recordings.