A Study on Music Genre Classification Based on Universal Acoustic Models

Classification of musical genres gives a useful measure of similarity and is often the most useful descriptor of a musical piece. Previous techniques to use hidden Markov models (HMMs) for automatic genre classification have used a single HMM to model an entire song or genre. This paper provides a framework to give finer segmentation of HMMs through acoustic segment modeling. Modeling each of these acoustic segments with an HMM builds a timbral dictionary in the same fashion that one would create a phonetic dictionary for speech. A symbolic transcription is created by finding the most likely sequence of symbols. These transcriptions then serve as inputs into an efficient text classifier utilized to provide a solution to the genre classification problem. This paper demonstrates that language-ignorant approaches provide results that are consistent with the current state-of-the-art for the genre classification problem. However, the finer segmentation potentially allows for “musical language”-based syntactic rules to enhance performance.