Machine learningClassification

Instrument Recognition

Instrument recognition is the task of automatically identifying which musical instruments are present in an audio recording. Formalized by Eronen et al. (2005), it addresses timbre—the tonal quality distinguishing one instrument from another. Instrument recognition is essential for music analysis, transcription, automatic indexing, and music education. It remains challenging in polyphonic contexts but has achieved good accuracy in solo and sparse accompaniment scenarios.

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Sources

  1. Eronen, A., Peltonen, V., Tuomi, J., Klapuri, A., Fagerlund, S., Sorsa, T., & Lorho, G. (2005). Audio-based context recognition. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 14(1), 321-329. DOI: 10.1109/TSA.2005.858789
  2. Benetos, E., Holzapfel, A., Kotropoulos, C., & Pikrakis, A. (2013). Polyphonic instrument recognition using source separation and feature integration. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. link
  3. Cai, R., Lu, L., Hanjalic, A., Zhang, H. J., & Cai, L. H. (2007). A new tool for music tagging and contextual music search. In Proceedings of the International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. DOI: 10.1145/1277741.1277854

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Referenced by

ScholarGateInstrument Recognition (Musical Instrument Recognition Algorithm). Retrieved 2026-06-04 from https://scholargate.app/en/music-information-retrieval/instrument-recognition