In this paper, we propose a method for characterizing a musical signal by extracting a set of sinusoidal descriptors reflecting the maximum information contained in this signal. We focus our study on a signal of oriental music characterized by its richness in tone that can be extended to 1/4 tone, taking into account the frequency and time characteristics of this type of music. To do so, the descriptors are extracted from the original signal which is framed and analyzed on a window of short duration. This signal is viewed as the result of a combined modulation of amplitude and frequency. For this result, we apply short-term the non-stationary sinusoidal modeling technique. In each segment, the signal is represented by a set of sinusoids characterized by their intrinsic parameters: amplitudes, frequencies and phases. The extraction technique adopted is closely related to the slot window; therefore great importance is devoted to the study and the choice of the kind of the window and its width. It must be of variable length in order to get better results in the practical implementation of our method. For this purpose, evaluation tests were carried out by synthesizing the signal from the estimated parameters. Interesting results have been identified concerning the comparison of the synthesized signal with the original one.