Bottom-up broadcast neural network for music genre classification

Abstract

Music genre classification based on visual representation has been successfully explored over the last years. Recently, there has been increasing interest in attempting convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to achieve the task. However, most of the existing methods employ the mature CNN structures proposed in image recognition without any modification, which results in the learning features that are not adequate for music genre classification. Faced with the challenge of this issue, we fully exploit the low-level information from spectrograms of audio and develop a novel CNN architecture in this paper. The proposed CNN architecture takes the multi-scale time-frequency information into considerations, which transfers more suitable semantic features for the decision-making layer to discriminate the genre of the unknown music clip. The experiments are evaluated on the benchmark datasets including GTZAN, Ballroom, and Extended Ballroom. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 93.9%, 96.7%, 97.2% classification accuracies respectively, which to the best of our knowledge, are the best results on these public datasets so far. It is notable that the trained model by our proposed network possesses tiny size, only 0.18M, which can be applied in mobile phones or other devices with limited computational resources. Codes and model will be available at https://github.com/CaifengLiu/music-genre-classification .