spectralCentroid

Spectral centroid for audio signals and auditory spectrograms

Syntax

centroid = spectralCentroid(x,f)

centroid = spectralCentroid(x,f,Name=Value)

spectralCentroid(___)

Description

centroid = spectralCentroid(x,f) returns the spectral centroid of the signal, x, over time. How the function interprets x depends on the shape of f.

centroid = spectralCentroid(x,f,Name=Value) specifies options using one or more name-value arguments.

spectralCentroid(___) with no output arguments plots the spectral centroid. You can specify an input combination from any of the previous syntaxes.

• If the input is in the time domain, the spectral centroid is plotted against time.

• If the input is in the frequency domain, the spectral centroid is plotted against frame number.

Examples

Spectral Centroid of Time-Domain Audio

Read in an audio file and calculate the centroid using default parameters.

[audioIn,fs] = audioread("Counting-16-44p1-mono-15secs.wav");
centroid = spectralCentroid(audioIn,fs);

Plot the centroid against time.

spectralCentroid(audioIn,fs);

Spectral Centroid of Frequency-Domain Audio Data

Read in an audio file and then buffer the signal into 30 ms frames with 20 ms overlap. Calculate the octave power spectrum using the poctave function.

[audioIn,fs] = audioread("Counting-16-44p1-mono-15secs.wav");
audioBuffered = buffer(audioIn,round(fs*0.03),round(fs*0.02),"nodelay");
[p,cf] = poctave(audioBuffered,fs);

Calculate the centroid of the octave power spectrum over time.

centroid = spectralCentroid(p,cf);

Plot the centroid against the frame number.

spectralCentroid(p,cf)

Specify Nondefault Parameters

Read in an audio file.

[audioIn,fs] = audioread("Counting-16-44p1-mono-15secs.wav");

Calculate the centroid of the power spectrum over time. Calculate the centroid for 50 ms Hamming windows of data with 25 ms overlap. Use the range from 62.5 Hz to fs/2 for the centroid calculation.

centroid = spectralCentroid(audioIn,fs, ...
                            Window=hamming(round(0.05*fs)), ...
                            OverlapLength=round(0.025*fs), ...
                            Range=[62.5,fs/2]);

Plot the centroid against time.

spectralCentroid(audioIn,fs, ...
                 Window=hamming(round(0.05*fs)), ...
                 OverlapLength=round(0.025*fs), ...
                 Range=[62.5,fs/2])

Calculate Spectral Centroid of Streaming Audio

Create a dsp.AudioFileReader object to read in audio data frame-by-frame. Create a dsp.SignalSink to log the spectral centroid calculation.

fileReader = dsp.AudioFileReader('Counting-16-44p1-mono-15secs.wav');
logger = dsp.SignalSink;

In an audio stream loop:

1. Read in a frame of audio data.

2. Calculate the spectral centroid for the frame of audio.

3. Log the spectral centroid for later plotting.

To calculate the spectral centroid for only a given input frame, specify a window with the same number of samples as the input, and set the overlap length to zero.

Plot the logged data.

while ~isDone(fileReader)
    audioIn = fileReader();
    centroid = spectralCentroid(audioIn,fileReader.SampleRate, ...
                               'Window',hamming(size(audioIn,1)), ...
                               'OverlapLength',0);
    logger(centroid)
end

plot(logger.Buffer)
ylabel('Centroid (Hz)')

If the input to your audio stream loop has a variable samples-per-frame, an inconsistent samples-per-frame with the analysis window size of spectralCentroid, or if you want to calculate the spectral centroid for overlapped data, use dsp.AsyncBuffer.

Create a dsp.AsyncBuffer object, reset the logger, and release the file reader.

buff = dsp.AsyncBuffer;
reset(logger)
release(fileReader)

Specify that the spectral centroid is calculated for 50 ms frames with a 25 ms overlap.

fs = fileReader.SampleRate;

samplesPerFrame = round(fs*0.05);
samplesOverlap = round(fs*0.025);

samplesPerHop = samplesPerFrame - samplesOverlap;

win = hamming(samplesPerFrame);

while ~isDone(fileReader)
    audioIn = fileReader();
    write(buff,audioIn);
    
    while buff.NumUnreadSamples >= samplesPerHop
        audioBuffered = read(buff,samplesPerFrame,samplesOverlap);
        
        centroid = spectralCentroid(audioBuffered,fs, ...
                                    'Window',win, ...
                                    'OverlapLength',0);
        logger(centroid)
    end
    
end
release(fileReader)

Plot the logged data.

plot(logger.Buffer)
ylabel('Centroid (Hz)')

Input Arguments

x — Input signal

column vector | matrix | 3-D array

Input signal, specified as a vector, matrix, or 3-D array. How the function interprets x depends on the shape of f.

Data Types: single | double

f — Sample rate or frequency vector (Hz)

scalar | vector

Sample rate or frequency vector in Hz, specified as a scalar or vector, respectively. How the function interprets x depends on the shape of f:

• If f is a scalar, x is interpreted as a time-domain signal, and f is interpreted as the sample rate. In this case, x must be a real vector or matrix. If x is specified as a matrix, the columns are interpreted as individual channels.

• If f is a vector, x is interpreted as a frequency-domain signal, and f is interpreted as the frequencies, in Hz, corresponding to the rows of x. In this case, x must be a real L-by-M-by-N array, where L is the number of spectral values at given frequencies of f, M is the number of individual spectra, and N is the number of channels.

• The number of rows of x, L, must be equal to the number of elements of f.

Data Types: single | double

Name-Value Arguments

Specify optional pairs of arguments as Name1=Value1,...,NameN=ValueN, where Name is the argument name and Value is the corresponding value. Name-value arguments must appear after other arguments, but the order of the pairs does not matter.

Before R2021a, use commas to separate each name and value, and enclose Name in quotes.

Example: Window=hamming(256)

Note

The following name-value arguments apply if x is a time-domain signal. If x is a frequency-domain signal, name-value arguments are ignored.

Window — Window applied in time domain

rectwin(round(f*0.03)) (default) | vector

Window applied in the time domain, specified as a real vector. The number of elements in the vector must be in the range [1, size(x,1)]. The number of elements in the vector must also be greater than OverlapLength.

Data Types: single | double

OverlapLength — Number of samples overlapped between adjacent windows

round(f*0.02) (default) | non-negative scalar

Number of samples overlapped between adjacent windows, specified as an integer in the range [0, size(Window,1)).

Data Types: single | double

FFTLength — Number of bins in DFT

numel(Window) (default) | positive scalar integer

Number of bins used to calculate the DFT of windowed input samples, specified as a positive scalar integer. If unspecified, FFTLength defaults to the number of elements in the Window.

Data Types: single | double

Range — Frequency range (Hz)

[0,f/2] (default) | two-element row vector

Frequency range in Hz, specified as a two-element row vector of increasing real values in the range [0, f/2].

Data Types: single | double

SpectrumType — Spectrum type

"power" (default) | "magnitude"

Spectrum type, specified as "power" or "magnitude":

• "power" –– The spectral centroid is calculated for the one-sided power spectrum.

• "magnitude" –– The spectral centroid is calculated for the one-sided magnitude spectrum.

Data Types: char | string

Output Arguments

centroid — Spectral centroid (Hz)

scalar | vector | matrix

Spectral centroid in Hz, returned as a scalar, vector, or matrix. Each row of centroid corresponds to the spectral centroid of a window of x. Each column of centroid corresponds to an independent channel.

Algorithms

The spectral centroid is calculated as described in [1]:

$$\text{centroid}=\frac{{\displaystyle \sum _{k=b_1}^{b_2}{f}_k{s}_k}}{{\displaystyle \sum _{k=b_1}^{b_2}{s}_k}}$$

where

• f_k is the frequency in Hz corresponding to bin k.

• s_k is the spectral value at bin k.

• b₁ and b₂ are the band edges, in bins, over which to calculate the spectral centroid.

References

[1] Peeters, G. "A Large Set of Audio Features for Sound Description (Similarity and Classification) in the CUIDADO Project." Technical Report; IRCAM: Paris, France, 2004.

Extended Capabilities

C/C++ Code Generation
Generate C and C++ code using MATLAB® Coder™.

GPU Arrays
Accelerate code by running on a graphics processing unit (GPU) using Parallel Computing Toolbox™.

Version History

Introduced in R2019a