Randomly weighted CNNs for (music) audio classification

Abstract: The computer vision literature shows that randomly weighted neural networks perform reasonably as feature extractors. Following this idea, we study how non-trained (randomly weighted) convolutional neural networks perform as feature extractors for (music) audio classification tasks. We use features extracted from the embeddings of deep architectures as input to a classifier - with the goal to compare classification accuracies when using different randomly weighted architectures. By following this methodology, we run a comprehensive evaluation of the current deep architectures for audio classification, and provide evidence that the architectures alone are an important piece for resolving (music) audio problems using deep neural networks.