Advanced Music Audio Feature Learning with Deep Networks

Music is a means of reflecting and expressing emotion. Personal preferences in music vary between individuals, influenced by situational and environmental factors. Inspired by attempts to develop alternative feature extraction methods for audio signals, this research analyzes the use of deep network structures for extracting features from musical audio data represented in the frequency domain. Image-based network models are designed to be robust and accurate learners of image features. As such, this research develops image-based ImageNet deep network models to learn feature data from music audio spectrograms. This research also explores the use of an audio source separation tool for preprocessing the musical audio before training the network models. The use of source separation allows the network model to learn features that highlight individual contributions to the audio track, and use those features to improve classification results. The features extracted from the data are used to highlight characteristics of the audio tracks, which are then used to train classifiers that categorize the musical data for genre and auto-tag classifications. The results obtained from each model are contrasted with state-of-the-art methods of classification and tag prediction for musical tracks. Deeper networks with input source separation are shown to yield the best results

Beat histogram features for rhythm-based musical genre classification using multiple novelty functions

In this paper we present beat histogram features for multiple level rhythm description and evaluate them in a musical genre classification task. Audio features pertaining to various musical content categories and their related novelty functions are extracted as a basis for the creation of beat histograms. The proposed features capture not only amplitude, but also tonal and general spectral changes in the signal, aiming to represent as much rhythmic information as possible. The most and least informative features are identified through feature selection methods and are then tested using Support Vector Machines on five genre datasets concerning classification accuracy against a baseline feature set. Results show that the presented features provide comparable classification accuracy with respect to other genre classification approaches using periodicity histograms and display a performance close to that of much more elaborate up-to-date approaches for rhythm description. The use of bar boundary annotations for the texture frames has provided an improvement for the dance-oriented Ballroom dataset. The comparably small number of descriptors and the possibility of evaluating the influence of specific signal components to the general rhythmic content encourage the further use of the method in rhythm description tasks

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

Automatic Genre Classification of Latin Music Using Ensemble of Classifiers

This paper presents a novel approach to the task of automatic music genre classification which is based on ensemble learning. Feature vectors are extracted from three 30-second music segments from the beginning, middle and end of each music piece. Individual classifiers are trained to account for each music segment. During classification, the output provided by each classifier is combined with the aim of improving music genre classification accuracy. Experiments carried out on a dataset containing 600 music samples from two Latin genres (Tango and Salsa) have shown that for the task of automatic music genre classification, the features extracted from the middle and end music segments provide better results than using the beginning music segment. Furthermore, the proposed ensemble method provides better accuracy than using single classifiers and any individual segment

A Deep Representation for Invariance And Music Classification

Representations in the auditory cortex might be based on mechanisms similar to the visual ventral stream; modules for building invariance to transformations and multiple layers for compositionality and selectivity. In this paper we propose the use of such computational modules for extracting invariant and discriminative audio representations. Building on a theory of invariance in hierarchical architectures, we propose a novel, mid-level representation for acoustical signals, using the empirical distributions of projections on a set of templates and their transformations. Under the assumption that, by construction, this dictionary of templates is composed from similar classes, and samples the orbit of variance-inducing signal transformations (such as shift and scale), the resulting signature is theoretically guaranteed to be unique, invariant to transformations and stable to deformations. Modules of projection and pooling can then constitute layers of deep networks, for learning composite representations. We present the main theoretical and computational aspects of a framework for unsupervised learning of invariant audio representations, empirically evaluated on music genre classification.Comment: 5 pages, CBMM Memo No. 002, (to appear) IEEE 2014 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2014

Designing a Neural Network Based Audio Classification System

Artificial neural networks have found profound success in the area of pattern recognition. The collections of digital music have become increasingly common over the recent years. As the amount of data increases, digital context classification is becoming more important. In this thesis, we are studying content-based classification of digital musical signals according to their musical genre (e.g. : jazz, rock, pop and blues) and the features uses. The purpose of this thesis is to propose of designing a neural network technique, signal processing and related works of research. In addition, the methodology that used in designing audio classification model using neural network is introduced. The method was follow in this thesis is content analysis, and the designing of the model has through several phases: requirements analysis, knowledge representation and model designing. The theory behind the used features is reviewed and the fining from the proposed designing is presented