Musical instrument identification based on harmonic temporal timbre features

The Music Instrument Identification research is an important and difficult problem in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). In this paper an algorithm based on flexible harmonic model is proposed to represent the pitch in music by Gaussian mixture structure. The proposed algorithm models each spectral envelope of underlying harmonic structure to approximate the real music and uses EM algorithm to estimate the parameters. Not only is it able to estimate the multipitch (F0) but it also takes the attack problem (a kind of inharmonic structure at the beginning of some pitches) into account. The proposed algorithm makes it possible to envisage the use of timbre features derived from both harmonic part and attack part. Musical instrument recognition is then carried out by using SVM classifier. Experiment shows high performance of the proposed algorithm for instrument identification task.