Temporal Feature Integration for Music Organisation

Abstract

This Ph.D. thesis focuses on temporal feature integration for music organisation. Temporal feature integration is the process of combining all the feature vectors of a given time-frame into a single new feature vector in order to capture relevant information in the frame. Several existing methods for handling sequences of features are formulated in the temporal feature integration framework. Two datasets for music genre classification have been considered as valid test-beds for music organisation. Human evaluations of these, have been obtained to access the subjectivity on the datasets. Temporal feature integration has been used for ranking various short-time features at different time-scales. This include short-time features such as the Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), linear predicting coding coefficients (LPC) and various MPEG-7 short-time features. The ‘consensus sensitivity ranking' approach is proposed for ranking the short-time features at larger time-scales according to their discriminative power in a music genre classification task. The multivariate AR (MAR) model has been proposed for temporal feature integration. It effectively models local dynamical structure of the short-time features. Different kernel functions such as the convolutive kernel, the product probability kernel and the symmetric Kullback Leibler divergence kernel, which measures similarity between frames of music have been investigated for aiding temporal feature integration in music organisation. A special emphasis is put on the product probability kernel for which the MAR model is derived in closed form. A thorough investigation, using robust machine learning methods, of the MAR model on two different music genre classification datasets, shows a statistical significant improvement using this model in comparison to existing temporal feature integration models. This improvement was more pronounced for the larger and more difficult dataset. Similar findings where observed using the MAR model in a product probability kernel. The MAR model clearly outperformed the other investigated density models: the multivariate Gaussian model and the Gaussian mixture model