Towards Interpreting and Improving the Latent Space for Musical Chord Recognition

Automatic chord recognition (ACR) naturally faces musical ambiguities between chord classes. These can be responsible for many misclassifications, especially in large chord vocabularies. In this paper, we propose a metric learning approach utilizing a triplet loss for the task of ACR in order to reduce chord ambiguities. In particular, we investigate how metric learning with different triplet sampling strategies re-aligns the distances between different chord classes in the latent space. Our main finding is that metric learning significantly improves the ACR performance for two taxonomies with five and nine chord classes.