Feature Extraction is the core of content-based description of audio files. With feature extraction from audio, a computer is able to recognize the content of a piece of music without the need of annotated labels such as artist, song title or genre. This is the essential basis for information retrieval tasks, such as similarity based searches (query-by-example, query-by-humming, etc.), automatic classification into categories, or automatic organization and clustering of music archives.
Content-based description requires the development of feature extraction techniques that analyze the acoustic characteristics of the signal. Features extracted from the audio signal are intended to describe the stylistic content of the music, e.g. beat, presence of voice, timbre, etc.
We use methods from digital signal processing and consider psycho-acoustic models in order to extract suitable semantic information from music. We developed various feature sets, which are appropriate for different tasks.