Automatic Genre Classification of Musical Signals

Abstract

We present a strategy to perform automatic genre classification of musical signals. The technique divides the signals into 21.3 milliseconds frames, from which 4 features are extracted. The values of each feature are treated over 1-second analysis segments. Some statistical results of the features along each analysis segment are used to determine a vector of summary features that characterizes the respective segment. Next, a classification procedure uses those vectors to differentiate between genres. The classification procedure has two main characteristics: (1) a very wide and deep taxonomy, which allows a very meticulous comparison between different genres, and (2) a wide pairwise comparison of genres, which allows emphasizing the differences between each pair of genres. The procedure points out the genre that best fits the characteristics of each segment. The final classification of the signal is given by the genre that appears more times along all signal segments. The approach has shown very good accuracy even for the lowest layers of the hierarchical structure.