Musical Instrument Recognition using the Scattering Transform

Abstract: Thanks to the advancement of technological progress in networking and signal processing, we can access a large amount of musical content. In order for users to search among these vast catalogs, they need to have access to music-related information beyond the pure digital music file. Manual annotation of music is too expensive, therefore automated annotation would be of great use. A meaningful description of the musical pieces requires the incorporation of information about the instruments present in them. In this work, we present an approach for musical instrument recognition using the scattering transform, which is a transformation that gives a translation invariant representation, that is stable to deformations and preserves high frequency information for classication. We study recognition in both singleinstrument and multiple-instrument contexts. We compare the performance of models using the scattering transform to those using other standard features. We also examine the impact of the amount of training data. The experiments carried out do not show a clear superior performance of either feature representation. Still, the scattering transform is worth taking into account when choosing a way to extract features if we want to be able to characterize non-stationary signal structures.