Musical instrument identification using Principal Component Analysis and Multi-Layered Perceptrons

This study aims to create an automatic musical instrument classifier by extracting audio features from real sample sounds. These features are reduced using Principal Component Analysis and the resultant data is used to train a Multi-Layered Perceptron. We found that the RMS temporal envelope and the evolution of the centroid gave the most interesting results of the features studied. These results were found to be competitive whether the scope of the data was across one octave or across the range of each instrument.