An information processing method for acoustic emission signal inspired from musical staff

•AE signals with complex environments are mapped into the normalized musical space.•Four new indexes are proposed to comprehensively describe the AE signal.•The processed information requires a small storage space to maintain high fidelity.

This study proposes a musical-staff-inspired signal processing method for standard description expressions for discrete signals and describing the integrated characteristics of acoustic emission (AE) signals. The method maps various AE signals with complex environments into the normalized musical space. Four new indexes are proposed to comprehensively describe the signal. Several key features, such as contour, amplitude, and signal changing rate, are quantitatively expressed in a normalized musical space. The processed information requires only a small storage space to maintain high fidelity. The method is illustrated by using experiments on sandstones and computed tomography (CT) scanning to determine its validity for AE signal processing.