Audio Information Retrieval and Musical Acoustics

Information retrieval and machine learning have grown to the point of playing a leading role in all aspects of sound analysis. There are some research areas, however, in which the potential of information retrieval techniques is only now beginning to have an impact on the research community. One of these areas is musical acoustics. In this area, in fact, machine intelligence and information retrieval have been widely used only for timbral analysis of the tone produced by musical instruments, thus effectively objectifying an analysis that is traditionally considered subjective. The role of information retrieval and machine learning in the analysis of vibrational and acoustic properties of musical instruments is a more recent development. In this manuscript, we offer an overview on methodologies for vibrational, acoustic and timbral analysis, based on machine intelligence. We discuss some challenges that are emerging today and will have to be faced in the near future in order to make information retrieval and machine learning become an integral part of the analysis process in musical acoustics.