Web-based music genre classification for timeline song visualization and analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a web application that retrieves songs from YouTube and classifies them into music genres. The tool explained in this study is based on models trained using the musical collection data from Audioset. For this purpose, we have used classifiers from distinct Machine Learning paradigms: Probabilistic Graphical Models (Naive Bayes), Feed-forward and Recurrent Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). All these models were trained in a multi-label classification scenario. Because genres may vary along a song's timeline, we perform classification in chunks of ten seconds. This capability is enabled by Audioset, which offers 10-second samples. The visualization output presents this temporal information in real time, synced with the music video being played, presenting classification results in stacked area charts, where scores for the top-10 labels obtained per chunk are shown. We briefly explain the theoretical and scientific basis of the problem and the proposed classifiers. Subsequently, we show how the application works in practice, using three distinct songs as cases of study, which are then analyzed and compared with online categorizations to discuss models performance and music genre classification challenges.