A Modulation Front-End for Music Audio Tagging

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks have been extensively explored in the task of automatic music tagging. The problem can be approached by using either engineered time-frequency features or raw audio as input. Modulation filter bank representations that have been actively researched as a basis for timbre perception have the potential to facilitate the extraction of perceptually salient features. We explore end-to-end learned front-ends for audio representation learning, ModNet and SincModNet, that incorporate a temporal modulation processing block. The structure is effectively analogous to a modulation filter bank, where the FIR filter center frequencies are learned in a data-driven manner. The expectation is that a perceptually motivated filter bank can provide a useful representation for identifying music features. Our experimental results provide a fully visualisable and interpretable front-end temporal modulation decomposition of raw audio. We evaluate the performance of our model against the state-of-the-art of music tagging on the MagnaTagATune dataset. We analyse the impact on performance for particular tags when time-frequency bands are subsampled by the modulation filters at a progressively reduced rate. We demonstrate that modulation filtering provides promising results for music tagging and feature representation, without using extensive musical domain knowledge in the design of this front-end.