It Must Be Louis ’cause Miles Don’t Shake like That: towards Identifying Jazz Trumpeters by Vibrato

We at Rutgers have a special interest in jazz performer identification. Rutgers is the home of the Institute for Jazz Studies, which houses one of the largest collection of jazz sound recordings. Automated performer identification would be an important tool for the curators of the collection. Our focus, therefore, has been on the identification of jazz instrumentalists, specifically jazz trumpet players. Lately, the emphasis in performer identification has been on machine learning, but despite its popularity, there is no apparent agreement as to which acoustic features are most useful. We have decided to return to comparison of acoustic visualizations in order to select features most appropriate to train machines for performer identification. In particular, we intend to examine various acoustic features related to vibrato.