A Closer Look on Artist Filters for Musical Genre Classification

Musical genre classification is the automatic classification of audio signals into user defined labels describing pieces of music. A problem inherent to genre classification experiments in music information retrieval research is the use of songs from the same artist in both training and test sets. We show that this does not only lead to overoptimistic accuracy results but also selectively favours particular classification approaches. The advantage of using models of songs rather than models of genres vanishes when applying an artist filter. The same holds true for the use of spectral features versus fluctuation patterns for preprocessing of the audio files.