The GTZAN dataset: Its contents, its faults, their effects on evaluation, and its future use

The GTZAN dataset appears in at least 100 published works, and is the most-used public dataset for evaluation in machine listening research for music genre recognition (MGR). Our recent work, however, shows GTZAN has several faults (repetitions, mislabelings, and distortions), which challenge the interpretability of any result derived using it. In this article, we disprove the claims that all MGR systems are affected in the same ways by these faults, and that the performances of MGR systems in GTZAN are still meaningfully comparable since they all face the same faults. We identify and analyze the contents of GTZAN, and provide a catalog of its faults. We review how GTZAN has been used in MGR research, and find few indications that its faults have been known and considered. Finally, we rigorously study the effects of its faults on evaluating five different MGR systems. The lesson is not to banish GTZAN, but to use it with consideration of its contents.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 128 reference

Music genre classification via joint sparse low-rank representation of audio features

A novel framework for music genre classification, namely the joint sparse low-rank representation (JSLRR) is proposed in order to: 1) smooth the noise in the test samples, and 2) identify the subspaces that the test samples lie onto. An efficient algorithm is proposed for obtaining the JSLRR and a novel classifier is developed, which is referred to as the JSLRR-based classifier. Special cases of the JSLRR-based classifier are the joint sparse representation-based classifier and the low-rank representation-based one. The performance of the three aforementioned classifiers is compared against that of the sparse representation-based classifier, the nearest subspace classifier, the support vector machines, and the nearest neighbor classifier for music genre classification on six manually annotated benchmark datasets. The best classification results reported here are comparable with or slightly superior than those obtained by the state-of-the-art music genre classification methods

Sparse Codes for Speech Predict Spectrotemporal Receptive Fields in the Inferior Colliculus

We have developed a sparse mathematical representation of speech that minimizes the number of active model neurons needed to represent typical speech sounds. The model learns several well-known acoustic features of speech such as harmonic stacks, formants, onsets and terminations, but we also find more exotic structures in the spectrogram representation of sound such as localized checkerboard patterns and frequency-modulated excitatory subregions flanked by suppressive sidebands. Moreover, several of these novel features resemble neuronal receptive fields reported in the Inferior Colliculus (IC), as well as auditory thalamus and cortex, and our model neurons exhibit the same tradeoff in spectrotemporal resolution as has been observed in IC. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that receptive fields of neurons in the ascending mammalian auditory pathway beyond the auditory nerve can be predicted based on coding principles and the statistical properties of recorded sounds.Comment: For Supporting Information, see PLoS website: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.100259

Music classification by low-rank semantic mappings

A challenging open question in music classification is which music representation (i.e., audio features) and which machine learning algorithm is appropriate for a specific music classification task. To address this challenge, given a number of audio feature vectors for each training music recording that capture the different aspects of music (i.e., timbre, harmony, etc.), the goal is to find a set of linear mappings from several feature spaces to the semantic space spanned by the class indicator vectors. These mappings should reveal the common latent variables, which characterize a given set of classes and simultaneously define a multi-class linear classifier that classifies the extracted latent common features. Such a set of mappings is obtained, building on the notion of the maximum margin matrix factorization, by minimizing a weighted sum of nuclear norms. Since the nuclear norm imposes rank constraints to the learnt mappings, the proposed method is referred to as low-rank semantic mappings (LRSMs). The performance of the LRSMs in music genre, mood, and multi-label classification is assessed by conducting extensive experiments on seven manually annotated benchmark datasets. The reported experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the LRSMs over the classifiers that are compared to. Furthermore, the best reported classification results are comparable with or slightly superior to those obtained by the state-of-the-art task-specific music classification methods

Music classification by low-rank semantic mappings

A challenging open question in music classification is which music representation (i.e., audio features) and which machine learning algorithm is appropriate for a specific music classification task. To address this challenge, given a number of audio feature vectors for each training music recording that capture the different aspects of music (i.e., timbre, harmony, etc.), the goal is to find a set of linear mappings from several feature spaces to the semantic space spanned by the class indicator vectors. These mappings should reveal the common latent variables, which characterize a given set of classes and simultaneously define a multi-class linear classifier that classifies the extracted latent common features. Such a set of mappings is obtained, building on the notion of the maximum margin matrix factorization, by minimizing a weighted sum of nuclear norms. Since the nuclear norm imposes rank constraints to the learnt mappings, the proposed method is referred to as low-rank semantic mappings (LRSMs). The performance of the LRSMs in music genre, mood, and multi-label classification is assessed by conducting extensive experiments on seven manually annotated benchmark datasets. The reported experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the LRSMs over the classifiers that are compared to. Furthermore, the best reported classification results are comparable with or slightly superior to those obtained by the state-of-the-art task-specific music classification methods