Title :
Making chroma features more robust to timbre changes
Author :
Müller, Meinard ; Ewert, Sebastian ; Kreuzer, Sebastian
Author_Institution :
Saarland Univ. & MPI Inf., Saarbrucken
Abstract :
Chroma-based audio features are a well-established tool for analyzing and comparing music data. By identifying spectral components that differ by a musical octave, chroma features show a high degree of invariance to variations in timbre. In this paper, we describe a novel procedure for making chroma features even more robust to changes in timbre and instrumentation while keeping their discriminative power. Our idea is based on the generally accepted observation that the lower mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are closely related to timbre. Now, instead of keeping the lower coefficients, we discard them and only keep the upper coefficients. Furthermore, using a pitch scale instead of a mel scale allows us to project the remaining coefficients onto the twelve chroma bins. Our systematic experiments show that the resulting chroma features have indeed gained a significant boost towards timbre invariance.
Keywords :
audio signal processing; information retrieval; music; pattern matching; spectral analysis; audio matching; chroma-based audio features; instrumentation; mel-frequency cepstral coefficients; music data analysis; music retrieval; musical octave; pitch scale; spectral component identification; timbre changes; Cepstral analysis; Cepstrum; Content based retrieval; Decorrelation; Harmonic analysis; Instruments; Mel frequency cepstral coefficient; Music information retrieval; Robustness; Timbre; Chroma feature; MFCC; audio matching; music retrieval; timbre-invariance;
Conference_Titel :
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2009. ICASSP 2009. IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Taipei
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-2353-8
Electronic_ISBN :
1520-6149
DOI :
10.1109/ICASSP.2009.4959974