MPEG-7 Audio Spectrum Basis as a signature of violin sound

The goal of the paper is to examine how robust MPEG-7 Audio Spectrum Basis features are as signatures of instruments from the same group. Instruments analyzed are contemporary concert violins competing in the international violinmaker competition. They have been recorded for research purposes, thus the set of sounds for each instrument and recording conditions are the same - 30 s long musical excerpts and a set of individual sounds. Audio Spectrum Basis captures the statistically most regular features of the sound feature space thus it has been expected to well characterize instruments. The results confirmed the expectations. Since violinmakers follow the same ideal model of instrument construction and use similar material for their creation, differences of their sound are tiny, Audio Spectrum Basis enabled discrimination of several instruments as more dissimilar then the others. However these outliers have been placed by jury musicians during competition on both boundaries of the ranking.