Computer identification of musical instruments using pattern recognition with cepstral coefficients as features

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 105; no. 3; p. 1933
• Main Author: Brown, J C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.03.1999
• Subjects: Algorithms; Auditory Perception - physiology; Computers; Databases as Topic; Electronic Data Processing; Humans; Models, Theoretical; Music; Normal Distribution; Sound
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.426728

Cepstral coefficients based on a constant Q transform have been calculated for 28 short (1-2 s) oboe sounds and 52 short saxophone sounds. These were used as features in a pattern analysis to determine for each of these sounds comprising the test set whether it belongs to the oboe or to the sax class. The training set consisted of longer sounds of 1 min or more for each of the instruments. A k-means algorithm was used to calculate clusters for the training data, and Gaussian probability density functions were formed from the mean and variance of each of the clusters. Each member of the test set was then analyzed to determine the probability that it belonged to each of the two classes; and a Bayes decision rule was invoked to assign it to one of the classes. Results have been extremely good and are compared to a human perception experiment identifying a subset of these same sounds.