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From the exploration of databases of instrument sounds to the selfassisted practice of musical instruments, methods for automatically and objectively assessing the quality of musical tones are in high demand. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm for estimating the duration of the attack, with particular attention to wind and bowed string instruments. In fact, for these instruments, the quality of the tones is highly influenced by the attack clarity, for which, together with pitch stability, the attack duration is an indicator often used by teachers by ear. Since the direct estimation of the attack duration from sounds is made difficult by the initial preponderance of the excitation noise, we propose a more robust approach based on the separation of the ensemble of the harmonics from the excitation noise, which is obtained by means of an improved pitchsynchronous wavelet transform. We also define a new parameter, the noise ducking time, which is relevant for detecting the extent of the noise component in the attack. In addition to the exploration of available sound databases, for testing our algorithm, we created an annotated data set in which several problematic sounds are included. Moreover, to check the consistency and robustness of our duration estimates, we applied our algorithm to sets of synthetic sounds with noisy attacks of programmable duration.

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