Comparing Sequential and“Bag of Sections” Techniques for Musical Genre Classification

A lot of genre classification work to date has gone into exploring features that demarcate genre either at the lowest (sample) level or the highest level (overall acoustic characteristics of the song). Features evaluated at the sample level are more concerned with sonic qualities like timbre and pitch, whereas higher-level features tend to focus on key, mode, tempo, and other descriptive features of the whole song. This paper focuses instead on the space between these two strata in order to evaluate the extent to which structural-level features of music (e.g. chorus or verse level) delimit particular musical genres. The challenge with this level is that one of the most important attributes of musical composition structures is their ordering, and their various repetitions throughout a particular song. As such, this paper compares different models that variously do or do not take sequencing into account in order to quantify the importance of song structure in determining genre.