Signal analysis with classical Gabor frames leads to a fixed time–frequency resolution over the whole time–frequency plane. To overcome the limitations imposed by this rigidity, we propose an extension of Gabor theory that leads to the construction of frames with time–frequency resolution changing over time or frequency. We describe the construction of the resulting nonstationary Gabor frames and give the explicit formula for the canonical dual frame for a particular case, the painless case. We show that wavelet transforms, constant-Q transforms and more general filter banks may be modeled in the framework of nonstationary Gabor frames. Further, we present the results in the finite-dimensional case, which provides a method for implementing the above-mentioned transforms with perfect reconstruction. Finally, we elaborate on two applications of nonstationary Gabor frames in audio signal processing, namely a method for automatic adaptation to transients and an algorithm for an invertible constant-Q transform.

In this paper, we present a new algorithm to estimate a signal from its short-time Fourier transform modulus (STFTM). This algorithm is computationally simple and is obtained by an acceleration of the well-known Griffin-Lim algorithm (GLA). Before deriving the algorithm, we will give a new interpretation of the GLA and formulate the phase recovery problem in an optimization form. We then present some experimental results where the new algorithm is tested on various signals. It shows not only significant improvement in speed of convergence but it does as well recover the signals with a smaller error than the traditional GLA.