Recent developments in automatic classification of musical instruments

Abstract

In this paper recent developments in automatic classification of musical instrument domain are presented. Issues related to automatic classification of music are data representation of musical instrument sounds, automatic musical sound recognition, musical duet separation, music recognition, etc. These problems belong to the so-called Musical Information Retrieval domain. The best developed is the automatic recognition of individual musical sounds. In rich literature on this subject many references can be found. Another issue deals with music information retrieval understood as searching for music-related features such as song titles, etc. A query-by-humming can be also cited as one of the MIR topics. The most difficult problem that deals with automatic recognition of multipitch excerpts still remains unsolved, however, recently some approaches to this issue can be found in the literature. Some of the mentioned problems were subjects of the research carried out at the Sound & Vision Department of the Gdansk University of Technology. The developed solutions in the domain of automatic classification of individual sounds, duet separation, and music recognition will be presented as examples of possible case-studies in the MIR domain. The proposed approach was evaluated on musical datebases created at the Department. [Work supported by KBN, Grant No. 4 T11D 014 22.]