Documenting Distinctive Features of Indigenous Bapedi Music

Distinctive and compact features

We consider the problem of extracting features for multi-class recognition problems. The features are required to make fine distinctions between similar classes, combined with tolerance for distortions and missing information. We define and compare two general approaches, both based on maximizing the delivered information for recognition: one divides the problem into multiple binary classificat...

The nature of distinctive features

Discovery of distinctive patterns in music

This paper proposes a new view of pattern discovery in music: mining of a corpus for maximally general patterns that are overrepresented with respect to an anticorpus. An algorithm for maximally general distinctive pattern discovery is described and applied to folk song melodies from three geographic regions. Distinctive patterns have applicability to comparative music analysis tasks where an a...

Distinctive Features Should Be Learned

Quantal phonetics and distinctive features

This paper reviews some of the basic premises of Quantal-Enhancement Theory as developed by K.N. Stevens and his colleagues. Quantal theory seeks to explain why some articulatory and acoustic dimensions are favored over others in distinctive feature contrasts across languages. In this paper, after a review of basic concepts, a protocol for quantal feature definitions is proposed and problems in...