Comparison of Performance in Automatic Classification between Chinese and Western Musical Instruments

Classification of musical instrument is resulted from musicology. Thus, automatic identification of instrument families not only benefits the study in musicology, but also worth of attention in MIR. Based on a database consists of 2177 clips from Chinese and Western instrumental music, the experiments provided in this paper evaluate the ability of automatic Chinese and Western instrument identification by confusion matrices. Regarding various features and classifiers, the experiment results revealed the similarity and difference between Chinese and western instrumental music, which produce new possibilities for the study in identifying and classifying Chinese and Western instrument families.