For music information retrieval tasks, a nearest neighbor classifier using the Kullback-Leibler divergence between Gaussian mixture models of songs' melfrequency cepstral coefficients is commonly used to match songs by timbre. In this paper, we analyze this distance measure analytically and experimentally by the use of synthesized MIDI files, and we find that it is highly sensitive to different instrument realizations. Despite the lack of theoretical foundation, it handles the multipitch case quite well when all pitches originate from the same instrument, but it has some weaknesses when different instruments play simultaneously. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that a source separation frontend can improve performance. Furthermore, we have evaluated the robustness to changes in key, sample rate, and bitrate.

We present a distance measure between audio files designed to identify cover songs, which are new renditions of previously recorded songs. For each song we compute the chromagram, remove phase information and apply exponentially distributed bands in order to obtain a feature matrix that compactly describes a song and is insensitive to changes in instrumentation, tempo and time shifts. As distance between two songs, we use the Frobenius norm of the difference between their feature matrices normalized to unit norm. When computing the distance, we take possible transpositions into account. In a test collection of 80 songs with two versions of each, 38% of the covers were identified. The system was also evaluated on an independent, international evaluation where it despite having much lower complexity performed on par with the winner of last year.

Recently, we proposed using Capon's minimum variance principle to find the fundamental frequency of a periodic waveform. The resulting estimator is formed such that it maximizes the output power of a bank of filters. We present an alternative optimal single filter design and then proceed to quantify the similarities and differences between the estimators using asymptotic analysis and Monte Carlo simulations. Our analysis shows that the single filter can be expressed in terms of the optimal filterbank and that the methods are asymptotically equivalent but generally different for finite length signals.