Audio genre classification using percussive pattern clustering combined with timbral features

Many musical genres and styles are characterized by distinct representative rhythmic patterns. In most automatic genre classification systems global statistical features based on timbral dynamics such as mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are utilized but so far rhythmic information has not so effectively been used. In order to extract bar-long unit rhythmic patterns for a music collection we propose a clustering method based on one-pass dynamic programming and k-means clustering. After extracting the fundamental rhythmic patterns for each style/genre a pattern occurrence histogram is calculated and used as a feature vector for supervised learning. Experimental results show that the automatically calculated rhythmic pattern information can be used to effectively classify musical genre/style and improve upon current approaches based on timbral features.