The rhythm transform: towards a Generic rhythm Description

In the past few years, automatic genre classification has become one of the most interesting topics in the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) field. Musical genre is one of the most valuable metadata when managing huge music databases and many successful efforts have been done to automatically compute it. Basically, timbric and rhythmic description of audio is used for this purpose. From our point of view, some of these descriptors have been designed under some rigid constrains and the generalization of these algorithms into more flexible applications becomes a difficult task. In this paper, we present a method for rhythmic description which can improve the efficiency and flexibility of genre classifiers when used in combination with timbre descriptors.