Previous attempts at music artist classification use frame level audio features which summarize frequency content within short intervals of time. Comparatively, more recent music information retrieval tasks take advantage of temporal structure in audio spectrograms using deep convolutional and recurrent models. This paper revisits artist classification with this new framework and empirically explores the impacts of incorporating temporal structure in the feature representation. To this end, an established classification architecture, a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), is applied to the artist20 music artist identification dataset under a comprehensive set of conditions. These include audio clip length, which is a novel contribution in this work, and previously identified considerations such as dataset split and feature level. Our results improve upon baseline works, verify the influence of the producer effect on classification performance and demonstrate the trade-offs between audio length and training set size. The best performing model achieves an average F1 score of 0.937 across three independent trials which is a substantial improvement over the corresponding baseline under similar conditions. Additionally, to showcase the effectiveness of the CRNN's feature extraction capabilities, we visualize audio samples at the model's bottleneck layer demonstrating that learned representations segment into clusters belonging to their respective artists.
In this paper we demonstrate the artist detection component of Minnowmatch, a machine listening and music retrieval engine. Minnowmatch (Mima) automatically determines various meta-data and makes classifications concerning a piece of audio using neural networks and support vector machines. The technologies developed in Minnowmatch may be used to create audio information retrieval systems, copyright protection devices, and recommendation agents. This paper concentrates on the artist or source detection component of Mima, which we show to classify a one-in-n artist space correctly 91 over a small song-set and 70 over a larger song set. We show that scaling problems using only neural networks for classification can be addressed with a pre-classification step of multiple support vector machines.  Music audio classification has most often been addressed bymodeling the statistics of broad spectral features, which, by design, exclude pitch information and reflect mainly instrumentation. We investigate using instead beat-synchronous chroma features, designed to reflect melodic and harmonic content and be invariant to instrumentation. Chroma features are less informative for classes such as artist, but contain information that is almost entirely independent of the spectral features, and hence the two can be profitably combined: Using a simple Gaussian classifier on a 20-way pop music artist identification task, we achieve 54 accuracy with MFCCs, 30 with chroma vectors, and 57 by combining the two. All the data and Matlab code to obtain these results are available. 1 Searching and organizing growing digital music collections requires automatic classification of music. This paper describes a new system, tested on the task of artist identification, that uses support vector machines to classify songs based on features calculated over their entire lengths. Since support vector machines are exemplarbased classifiers, training on and classifying entire songs instead of short-time features makes intuitive sense. On a dataset of 1200 pop songs performed by 18 artists, we show that this classifier outperforms similar classifiers that use only SVMs or song-level features. We also show that the KL divergence between single Gaussians and Mahalanobis distance between MFCC statistics vectors perform comparably when classifiers are trained and tested on separate albums, but KL divergence outperforms Mahalanobis distance when trained and tested on songs from the same albums.