Towards Home-made Dictionaries for Musical Feature Extraction

The majority of musical feature extraction applications are based on the Fourier transform in various disguises. This is despite the fact that this transform is subject to a series of restrictions, which admittedly ease the computation and interpretation of transform coefficients, but also imposes arguably unnecessary limitations on the ability of the transform to extract and identify features. However, replacing the nicely structured dictionary of the Fourier transform (or indeed other nice transform such as the wavelet transform) with a home-made dictionary is a dangerous task, since even the most basic properties are easily lost.