Automatic source identification of monophonic musical instrument sounds

Abstract

A system has been developed which automatically identifies the source of monophonic musical instrument sounds. Preprocessing of sound recordings includes calculation of the short term RMS energy envelope, principal component analysis and ratio/product transformations of the resultant principal components. An artificial neural network and a nearest neighbour classifier were compared to determine which one provided optimum classification ability. The system performance was tested on sounds recorded from four musical instruments chosen to represent each of the major musical instrument families and playing notes over the range of one octave under varying volume conditions. Classification accuracies in the range 93.8-100% were achieved.