Music Genre Classification: Genre-Specific Characterization and Pairwise Evaluation

In this paper, we report our initial investigations on the genre classification problem in Music Information Retrieval. Each music genre has its unique characteristics, which distinguish it from other genres. We adapt association analysis and use it to capture those characteristics using acoustic features, i.e., each genre's characteristics are represented by a set of features and their corresponding values. In addition, we consider that each candidate genre should have its own chance to be singled out, and compete for a new piece to be classified. Therefore, we conduct genre classification based on a pairwise dichotomy-like strategy. We compare the differences of the characteristics of two genres in a symmetric manner and use them to classify music genres. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through empirical experiments on one benchmark music dataset. The results are presented and discussed. Various related issues, such as potential future work along the same direction, are examined.