High Frequency Content measure

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The High Frequency Content measure is a simple measure, taken across a signal spectrum (usually a STFT spectrum), which can be used to characterise the amount of high-frequency content in the signal. The magnitudes of the spectral bins are added together, but mutliplying each magnitude by the bin "position" (proportional to the frequency):

$HFC = \sum_{i=0}^{N-1}i|x(n)|$

In contrast to perceptual measures, this is not based on any evidence about its relevance to human hearing. Despite that, it can be useful for some applications, such as onset detection.

[edit] References

P. Brossier, J. P. Bello and M. D. Plumbley. Real-time temporal segmentation of note objects in music signals, in Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2004), Miami, Florida, USA, November 1-6, 2004.
Masri, P. (1996). Computer modeling of Sound for Transformation and Synthesis of Musical Signal. PhD dissertation, University of Bristol.