Musical Instrument Classification Using Individual Partials

In a musical signals, the spectral and temporal contents of instruments often overlap. If the number of channels is at least the same as the number of instruments, it is possible to apply statistical tools to highlight the characteristics of each instrument, making their identification possible. However, in the underdetermined case, in which there are fewer channels than sources, the task becomes challenging. One possible way to solve this problem is to seek for regions in the time and/or frequency domains in which the content of a given instrument appears isolated. The strategy presented in this paper explores the spectral disjointness among instruments by identifying isolated partials, from which a number of features are extracted. The information contained in those features, in turn, is used to infer which instrument is more likely to have generated that partial. Hence, the only condition for the method to work is that at least one isolated partial exists for each instrument somewhere in the signal. If several isolated partials are available, the results are summarized into a single, more accurate classification. Experimental results using 25 instruments demonstrate the good discrimination capabilities of the method.