Automatic Fado Music Classification
This provides a tool for cultural heritage preservation by enabling automatic detection of Fado, an intangible heritage, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of automatically classifying Fado music from audio signals, achieving high accuracy rates of 97.6% in cross-validation and 95.8% in train/test setups.
In late 2011, Fado was elevated to the oral and intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO. This study aims to develop a tool for automatic detection of Fado music based on the audio signal. To do this, frequency spectrum-related characteristics were captured form the audio signal: in addition to the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and the energy of the signal, the signal was further analysed in two frequency ranges, providing additional information. Tests were run both in a 10-fold cross-validation setup (97.6% accuracy), and in a traditional train/test setup (95.8% accuracy). The good results reflect the fact that Fado is a very distinctive musical style.