An evolutionary multi-objective feature selection approach for detecting music segment boundaries of specific types

Abstract

The goal of music segmentation is to identify boundaries between parts of music pieces which are perceived as entities. Segment boundaries often go along with a change in musical properties including instrumentation, key, and tempo (or a combination thereof). One can consider different types (or classes) of boundaries according to these musical properties. In contrast to existing datasets with missing specifications of changing properties for annotated boundaries, we have created a set of artificial music tracks with precise annotations for boundaries of different types. This allows for a profound analysis and interpretation of annotated and predicted boundaries and a more exhaustive comparison of different segmentation algorithms. For this scenario, we formulate a novel multi-objective optimisation task that identifies boundaries of only a specific type. The optimisation is conducted by means of evolutionary multi-objective feature selection and a novelty-based segmentation approach. Furthermore, we provide lists of audio features from non-dominated fronts which most significantly contribute to the estimation of given boundaries (the first objective) and most significantly reduce the performance of the prediction of other boundaries (the second objective).