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Towards a Characterization of Musical Timbre Based on Chroma Contours

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 322))

Abstract

Chroma conveying mainly a tonal content is considered as powerful representation that is widely used in musical information retrieval applications. In this paper, a new musical timbre description based only on the chromagram contours is investigated allowing the identification of both tonal content and particularly the instrument timbre (identity). After some steps of pre-processing and transformation, four methods are investigated as classifiers: support vector machine (SVM), neural network, invariant moments, and template matching based cross-correlation. All methods use only one pattern in training phase. Results are very promising and the graphical analysis demonstrates that contours are dependent on the music instrument. As first investigation, performance of about 70% is obtained with template matching and SVM classification techniques.

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ezzaidi, H., Bahoura, M., Hall, G.E. (2012). Towards a Characterization of Musical Timbre Based on Chroma Contours. In: Hassanien, A.E., Salem, AB.M., Ramadan, R., Kim, Th. (eds) Advanced Machine Learning Technologies and Applications. AMLTA 2012. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 322. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35326-0_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35326-0_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35325-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35326-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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