Wavelets for sparse representation of music

We are interested in obtaining a sparse representation of music signals by means of a discrete wavelet transform (DWT). That means we want the energy in the representation to be concentrated in few DWT coefficients. It is well-known that the decay of the DWT coefficients is strongly related to the number of vanishing moments of the mother wavelet, and to the smoothness of the signal. In this paper we present the result of applying two classical families of wavelets to a series of musical signals. The purpose is to determine a general relation between the number of vanishing moments of the wavelet and the sparseness of the DWT coefficients.