Binary Decision Tree Classification of Musical Sounds

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method of classifying musical sounds. An earlier work has shown the ability of a subset of the timbre attributes of musical sounds to classify musical sounds correctly in instrument families. This work focuses on the interpretation of the timbre attributes. The question is: which timbre attributes are useful for the classification of the sounds? These attributes are found by creating binary trees, the split questions of which are based on timbre attributes of musical sounds, including envelope, spectral envelope and noise parameters. The timbre attributes are calculated, from the additive parameters, for a large collection of musical instruments, generally for the full pitch range of each instrument. Experiments with