A Study on Music Genre Recognition and Classification Techniques

Automatic classification of music genre is widely studied topic in music information retrieval (MIR) as it is an efficient method to structure and organize the large numbers of music files available on the Internet. Generally, the genre classification process of music has two main steps: feature extraction and classification. The first step obtains audio signal information, while the second one classifies the music into various genres according to extracted features. In this paper, we present a study on techniques for automatic music genre recognition and classification. We first describe machine learning based chord recognition methods, such as hidden Markov models, neural networks, dynamic Bayesian network and rule-based methods, and template matching methods. We then explain supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised classification methods classifying music genres. Finally, we briefly describe the proposed method for automatic classification of music genres, which consists of three steps: chord labeling, genre matching and classification.