Instrument recognition in polyphonic music

We propose a method for the recognition of musical instruments in polyphonic music excerpted from commercial recordings. By exploiting some cues on the common structures of musical ensembles, we show that it is possible to recognize up to 4 instruments playing concurrently. The system associates a hierarchical classification tree with a class-pairwise feature selection technique and Gaussian mixture models to discriminate possible combinations of instruments. Successful identification is achieved over short-time windows, enabling the system to be employed for segmentation purposes.