Musical genre classification by means of Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems: A preliminary approach

Musical Genre is part of the basic information required for classifying musical audio, and fundamental for music information retrieval systems. The problem of automatic musical genre detection has attracted large attention in the last decade, due to the emergence of digital music databases and Internet. Although a number of techniques has been applied to the problem, no general solution still exists, due to the imprecise features that properly define musical genre. This paper presents a preliminary attempt to apply Fuzzy Rule-Based System (FRBS) in cooperation with Evolutionary Algorithms to musical genre classification. The novelty of the approach -which allows us to use fuzzy information extracted from audio filesis aligned with the fuzzy nature of the problem at hand, where no clear-cut rules are available for the classification. Preliminary results presented allows to foresee the potential of the technique.