Link to summary: pdf
Aucouturier, J.J., F. Pachet, and M. Sandler. 2005. The way it sounds: Timbre models for analysis and retrieval of polyphonic music signals. IEEE Transactions of Multimedia.
A paper describing timbre similarity using MFCCs and long-term statistics to determine the 'global' timbre of a song. A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is used to model the MFCCs, and to generate a probability measure to determine the similarity between two songs |
Grey, J.M. 1975. An exploration of musical timbre using computer-based techniques for analysis, synthesis and perceptual scaling. Ph.D. thesis, Dept. of Psychology, Stanford University.
PhD Thesis describing the perceptual similarity between sounds with different timbres. A Multi-dimensional Scaling (MDS) algorithm is used to create 2 and 3-dimensional timbre spaces |
Herrera-Boyer, P., G. Peeters, and S. Dubnov. 2003. Automatic Classification of Musical Instrument Sounds. Journal of New Music Research 32(1):3
A review paper of different timbre similarity algorithms and techniques |
Pachet, F., A. La Burthe, A. Zils, and J.J. Aucouturier. 2004. Popular music access: The Sony music browser. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55(12):1037--1044.
Paper describing a timbre similarity search engine utilizing global similarity features. |
Wessel, D. 1979. Timbre space as a musical control structure. Computer Music Journal 3(2):45--52.
A paper describing the perceptual similarity between different timbres. A two-dimensional timbre space is created using multi-dimensional scaling |