Category-level identification of non-registered musical instrument sounds

This paper describes a method that identifies sounds of non-registered musical instruments (i.e., musical instruments that are not contained in the training data) at a category level. Although the problem of how to deal with non-registered musical instruments is essential in musical instrument identification, it has not been dealt with in previous studies. Our method solves this problem by distinguishing between registered and non-registered instruments and identifying the category name of the non-registered instruments. When a given sound is registered, its instrument name, e.g. violin, is identified. Even if it is not registered, its category name, e.g. strings, can be identified. The important issue in achieving such identification is to adopt a musical instrument hierarchy reflecting the acoustical similarity. We present a method for acquiring such a hierarchy from a musical instrument sound database. Experimental results show that around 77% of non-registered instrument sounds, on average, were correctly identified at the category level.