This is a preliminary study on HR-Mel, a fixed 3-band, 96-bin mel representation for 44.1 kHz music signals with asymmetric bin allocation (40/32/24 bins for 0–1.5 kHz, 1.5–6 kHz, and 6–20 kHz bands respectively) and band-specific pointwise nonlinearities. In a preliminary evaluation using pseudo-inverse magnitude reconstruction, HR-Mel reduces overall STFT reconstruction error by 25.3% relative to a standard 96-bin log-mel baseline. The improvement is driven primarily by the low-frequency band (<1.5 kHz: 27.0% improvement). ⚠️ Note: This is an exploratory study based on a 12-track private dataset with magnitude-only pseudo-inverse reconstruction. Results should be interpreted as preliminary evidence for asymmetric multi-band allocation rather than as a standalone demonstration of compression gain. Broader validation on public datasets, perceptual evaluation, and downstream task integration remain as future work. Code: https://github.com/mini-kio/HR-Mel
Kio (Mon,) studied this question.