Time-Frequency Audio Features for Speech-Music Classification

Abstract: Distinct striation patterns are observed in the spectrograms of speech and music. This motivated us to propose three novel time-frequency features for speech-music classification. These features are extracted in two stages. First, a preset number of prominent spectral peak locations are identified from the spectra of each frame. These important peak locations obtained from each frame are used to form Spectral peak sequences (SPS) for an audio interval. In second stage, these SPS are treated as time series data of frequency locations. The proposed features are extracted as periodicity, average frequency and statistical attributes of these spectral peak sequences. Speech-music categorization is performed by learning binary classifiers on these features. We have experimented with Gaussian mixture models, support vector machine and random forest classifiers. Our proposal is validated on four datasets and benchmarked against three baseline approaches. Experimental results establish the validity of our proposal.