Goniometers are a Powerful Acoustic Feature for Music Information Retrieval Tasks

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of goniometers, tools for monitoring spatial audio features, as a novel acoustic feature for music information retrieval, demonstrating their effectiveness in genre classification and album clustering.

Contribution

It introduces goniometers as a new acoustic feature for MIR tasks and shows their advantages over traditional features through classification and clustering experiments.

Findings

Goniometers can classify different music genres.

Goniometers effectively cluster albums based on spatial audio features.

They provide causally meaningful insights for music production.

Abstract

Goniometers, also known as Phase Scopes or Vector Scopes, are audio metering tools that help music producers and mixing engineers monitor spatial aspects of a music mix, such as the stereo panorama, the width of single sources, the amount and diffuseness of reverberation as well as phase cancellations that may occur on the sweet-spot and in a mono-mixdown. In addition, they implicitly inform about the dynamics of the sound. Self-organizing maps trained with a goniometer, are consulted to explore the usefulness of this acoustic feature for music information retrieval tasks. One can see that goniometers are able to classify different genres and cluster a single album. The advantage of goniometers is the causality: Music producers and mixing engineers consciously consult goniometers to reach their desired sound, which is not the case for other acoustic features, from Zero-Crossing Rate to Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients.