Temporal integration for audio classification with application to musical instrument classification

Nowadays, it appears essential to design automatic indexing tools which provide meaningful and efficient means to describe the musical audio content. There is in fact a growing interest for music information retrieval (MIR) applications amongst which the most popular are related to music similarity retrieval artist identification, musical genre or instrument recognition. Current MIR-related classification systems usually do not take into account the mid-term temporal properties of the signal (over several frames) and lie on the assumption that the observations of the features in different frames are statistically independent. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the information carried by the evolution of these characteristics over time. To that purpose we propose a number of methods for early and late temporal integration and provide an in-depth experimental study on their interest for the task of musical instrument recognition on solo musical phrases. In particular, the impact of the time horizon over which the temporal integration is performed will be assessed both for fixed and variable frame length analysis. Also, a number of recently proposed alignment kernels will be used for late temporal integration. For all experiments, the results are compared to a state of the art musical instrument recognition system.