Clustering Spectral Filters for Extensible Feature Extraction in Musical Instrument Classification

We propose a technique of training models for feature extraction using prior expectation of regions of importance in an instrument’s timbre. Over a dataset of training examples, we extract significant spectral peaks, calculate their ratio to fundamental frequency, and use kmeans clustering to identify a set of windows of spectral prominence for each instrument. These windows are used to extract amplitude values from training data to use as features in classification tasks. We test this approach on two databases of 17 instruments, cross evaluate between datasets, and compare with MFCC features.