Acoustical feature analysis and optimization for aesthetic recognition of Chinese traditional music

Abstract

Chinese traditional music, a vital expression of Chinese cultural heritage, possesses both a profound emotional resonance and artistic allure. This study sets forth to refine and analyze the acoustical features essential for the aesthetic recognition of Chinese traditional music, utilizing a dataset spanning five aesthetic genres. Through recursive feature elimination, we distilled an initial set of 447 low-level physical features to a more manageable 44, establishing their feature-importance coefficients. This reduction allowed us to estimate the quantified influence of higher-level musical components on aesthetic recognition, following the establishment of a correlation between these components and their physical counterparts. We conducted a comprehensive examination of the impact of various musical elements on aesthetic genres. Our findings indicate that the selected 44-dimensional feature set could enhance aesthetic recognition. Among the high-level musical factors, timbre emerges as the most influential, followed by rhythm, pitch, and tonality. Timbre proved pivotal in distinguishing between the JiYang and BeiShang genres, while rhythm and tonality were key in differentiating LingDong from JiYang, as well as LingDong from BeiShang.