Evolving Automatically High-Level Music Descriptors from Acoustic Signals

High-Level music descriptors are key ingredients for music information retrieval systems. Although there is a long tradition in extracting information from acoustic signals, the field of music information extraction is largely heuristic in nature. We present here a heuristic-based generic approach for extracting automatically high-level music descriptors from acoustic signals. This approach is based on Genetic Programming, that is used to build extraction functions as compositions of basic mathematical and signal processing operators. The search is guided by specialized heuristics that embody knowledge about the signal processing functions built by the system. Signal processing patterns are used in order to control the general function extraction methods. Rewriting rules are introduced to simplify overly complex expressions. In addition, a caching system further reduces the computing cost of each cycle. In this paper, we describe the overall system and compare its results against tradi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CMMR
• Authors: François Pachet, Aymeric Zils
• Keywords: Acoustic Signals, CMMR 2003, Music Information, Signal Processing