Musical Instrument Classification via Low-Dimensional Feature Vectors

Abstract: Music is a mysterious language that conveys feeling and thoughts via different tones and timbre. For better understanding of timbre in music, we chose music data of 6 representative instruments, analysed their timbre features and classified them. Instead of the current trend of Neural Network for black-box classification, our project is based on a combination of MFCC and LPC, and augmented with a 6-dimensional feature vector designed by ourselves from observation and attempts. In our white-box model, we observed significant patterns of sound that distinguish different timbres, and discovered some connection between objective data and subjective senses. With a totally 32-dimensional feature vector and a naive all-pairs SVM, we achieved improved classification accuracy compared to a single tool. We also attempted to analyze music pieces downloaded from the Internet, found out different performance on different instruments, explored the reasons and suggested possible ways to improve the performance.