A Perceptual Study on Music Segmentation and Genre Classification

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is an interdisciplinary area that is engaged in the retrieval of information from music. It includes various tasks, such as music classification, clustering, perception and cognition, etc. In this article, we report our recent perceptual studies on segmentation and genre classification, two indispensable steps in the MIR process. Segmentation attempts to capture 'drastic' changes in music and provides a basis for further perceptual and computational analysis while genre classification amounts to separating music into different groups such that each group uniformly represents a music genre. Our perceptual study considers various related issues. The goal of this work is to (1) explore and deepen our understanding of the relationship between perceptual surface and perceptual structure of music through segmentation by human subjects and (2) reveal and demonstrate the multi-label nature of genre classification.