Subject: Mel scale, in general From: Pierre Divenyi <pdivenyi@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:34:50 +0200 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>For the musician-me, the Mel scale is an oxymoron -- I know quite well what the half or the double of an interval is, regardless of its chroma and regardless of whether the interval is sanctioned by the Western system. For the psychoacoustician-me, the concept of the Mel scale is invalid. When experience (i.e., musicianship) is detrimental to determining a scale, any scientifically thinking individual should just scratch his/her head and close the book on the topic. Because of this negative conclusion, I have been wondering for a long time why the speech science and technology community insists on basing their work on MFCC, a measure derived from an at best dubious and at worst invalid frequency scale. -Pierre Divenyi