Acoustical-similarity-based Musical Instrument Hierarchy and Its Application to Musical Instrument Identification
Tetsuro Kitahara, Masataka Goto, Hiroshi G. Okuno · 2004
This paper describes a method of constructing a musical instrument hierarchy reflecting the similarity of acousti-cal features. Although this acoustical hierarchy is use-ful for various purposes as well as investigating the tim-bres of musical instruments, it has not been reported in the literature. The main issues in constructing such a hi-erarchy are what feature space is used and how to ob-tain the representative position of each instrument in the feature space. To solve the first issue, we use a feature space that facilitates identification of 6247 solo tones of 19 instruments with an accuracy of 80%. To solve the second issue, we approximate the distribution of each in-strument using a large number of sounds. Experimen-tal results using 6247 solo tones of 19 instruments show that the hierarchy obtained by our method is partially dif-ferent from a conventional one. In addition, this paper reports category-level identification of non-registered in-struments using our hierarchy. 1.