Event Synchronous Wavelet transform approach to the extraction of Musical Thumbnails

Fast browsing of digital collections of music would largely benefit from the availability of representative audio excerpts of the pieces. Similar to their visual counterparts found in digital photo albums, music thumbnails should offer a comprehensive listening experience while requiring a limited storage space or communication data rate. The approach to the generation of musical thumbnails of music proposed in this paper is based on an application of the Pitch- Synchronous Wavelet Transform, where the “pitch” is tuned to the elementary measure of the piece. The music thumbnail is encoded by the low rate coefficient sequence pertaining to the scaling residue of the transform. The scaling component represents the pseudo-periodic trend of the piece over several measures. Due to pseudo-periodicity, the time duration of the thumbnail can be arbitrarily extended in listening with no audible artifacts.