“Computing with words” Concept Applied to Musical Information Retrieval
Bożena Kostek · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2003
The objective of the paper is to provide cognitive-based mechanisms underlying processing of musical instrument sounds. The system proposed by the author based on the rough set method and on fuzzy logic provides knowledge on how humans internally represent such notions as quality and timbre and therefore it allows for the human-like automatic processing of musical data. Therefore ”Computing with words” concept can be used in musical information retrieval domain by offering better processing of subjective descriptors of musical instrument sounds and enabling the analysis of data that would result in extraction of semantic information related to musical instrument sounds. This paper shows first a review of developments in the domain of timbre mapping and classification. A decision table is built of semantic descriptors of musical instrument sounds, then rules extracted by the rough set method and the processing of musical timbre based on fuzzy logic is shown. An example of rough-fuzzy processing is given and conclusions are derived.