Comparison of different representations based on nonlinear features for music genre classification

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the descriptiveness and recognition properties of different feature representations for the analysis of musical signals, aiming in the exploration of their microand macro-structures, for the task of music genre classification. We explore nonlinear methods, such as the AM-FM model and ideas from fractal theory, so as to model the time-varying harmonic structure of musical signals and the geometrical complexity of the music waveform. The different feature representations' efficacy is compared regarding their recognition properties for the specific task. The proposed features are evaluated against and in combination with Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), using both static and dynamic classifiers, accomplishing an error reduction of 28%, illustrating that they can capture important aspects of music.