A Study on Monophonic Tremolo Recordings of Chinese Traditional Instrument Pipa Using Spectral Slope Curve

Involving with rapid intensity modulation, the tremolo in plucked string instruments, particularly Chinese traditional instrument pipa, vitally enriches the musical human perceptions and local styles. In this paper, we propose to detect the pipa tremolo onsets in a new angle and found that the spectral slope curve, as a single parameter framewise feature, is effective to deal with the spurious amplitude peaks produced by the attack noise from fake nails. Evaluated on our toy dataset, STFT-based spectral slope curve demonstrates its significance on tremolo onset detection in monophonic pipa clips. The tremolo onsets analyzed here could be applied to more detailed parameter estimates afterward.