On the Use of Sparce Time Relative Auditory Codes for Music

Many if not most audio features used in MIR research are inspired by work done in speech recognition and are variations on the spectrogram. Recently, much attention has been given to new representations of audio that are sparse and time-relative. These representations are efficient and able to avoid the time-frequency trade-off of a spectrogram. Yet little work with music streams has been conducted and these features remain mostly unused in the MIR community. In this paper we further explore the use of these features for musical signals. In particular, we investigate their use on realistic music examples (i.e. released commercial music) and their use as input features for supervised learning. Furthermore, we identify three specific issues related to these features which will need to be further addressed in order to obtain the full benefit for MIR applications.