Drum Sound Analysis for the Manipulation of Rhythm in Drum Loops

This paper addresses the issue of drum sound classification in the context of automatic rhythm modification of drum loops. The proposed method segments the signal using an onset detection algorithm, characterises segmented sounds using a spectral feature set, and classifies them using k-means clustering. We propose a simple taxonomy for the grouping of different instrumental sounds under a few utilitarian labels. Results demonstrate the adequacy of our proposed taxonomy while showing that our classification approach outperforms commonly-used supervised learning techniques