Ensemble size classification in Colombian Andean string music recordings

Reliable methods for automatic retrieval of semantic information from large digital music archives can play a critical role in musicological research and musical heritage preservation. With the advancement of machine learning techniques, new possibilities for information retrieval in scenarios where ground-truth data is scarce are now available. This work investigates the problem of counting the number of instruments in music recordings as a classification task. For this purpose, a new data set of Colombian Andean string music was compiled and annotated by expert musicologists. Different neural network architectures, as well as pre-processing steps and data augmentation techniques were systematically evaluated and optimized. The best deep neural network architecture achieved 80.7% file-wise accuracy using only feed forward layers with linear magnitude spectrograms as input representation. This model will serve as a baseline for future research on ensemble size classification.