Automatic identification of audio recordings based on statistical modeling

This paper describes a methodology for the automatic identification of audio recordings of ethnic music. The identification is based on an application of hidden Markov models (HMMs), which are automatically built from a representation of the music pieces to be identified. States of the HMMs are labeled with music events, and the transition and observation probabilities are directly computed from the information on the music piece. The recordings are modeled by a set of acoustic features that are computed according with the characteristics of the music events. Three alternative approaches, based on typical applications of HMMs, are proposed to perform the identification. Tests carried out on collections of recordings showed that the methodology can achieve good results, and the identification rate is high enough to suggest applications for automatic retrieval of metadata and for the identification of alternative recordings of the same piece.