Single-labelled Music Genre Classification Using Content-Based Features

Abstract

In this paper we use content-based features to perform automatic classification of music pieces into genres. We categorise these features into four groups: features extracted from the Fourier transform’s magnitude spectrum, features designed to inform on tempo, pitch-related features, and chordal features. We perform a novel and thorough exploration of classification performance for different feature representations, including the mean and standard deviation of its distribution, by a histogram of various bin sizes, and using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. Finally, the paper uses information gain ranking to present a pruned feature vector used by six off-the-shelf classifiers. Logistic regression achieves the best performance with an 81% accuracy on 10 GTZAN genres.

Publication
PRASA-RobMech International Conference
Richard Klein
Richard Klein
PRIME Lab Director

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and a co-PI of the PRIME lab.

Benjamin Rosman
Benjamin Rosman
Lab Director

I am a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. I work in robotics, artificial intelligence, decision theory and machine learning.