{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-modulation-front-end-for-music-audio","title":"A Modulation Front-End for Music Audio Tagging","arxiv_id":"2105.11836","date":"2021-05-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Cyrus Vahidi","Charalampos Saitis","György Fazekas"],"abstract":"Convolutional Neural Networks have been extensively explored in the task of automatic music tagging. The problem can be approached by using either engineered time-frequency features or raw audio as input. Modulation filter bank representations that have been actively researched as a basis for timbre perception have the potential to facilitate the extraction of perceptually salient features. We explore end-to-end learned front-ends for audio representation learning, ModNet and SincModNet, that incorporate a temporal modulation processing block. The structure is effectively analogous to a modulation filter bank, where the FIR filter center frequencies are learned in a data-driven manner. The expectation is that a perceptually motivated filter bank can provide a useful representation for identifying music features. Our experimental results provide a fully visualisable and interpretable front-end temporal modulation decomposition of raw audio. We evaluate the performance of our model against the state-of-the-art of music tagging on the MagnaTagATune dataset. We analyse the impact on performance for particular tags when time-frequency bands are subsampled by the modulation filters at a progressively reduced rate. We demonstrate that modulation filtering provides promising results for music tagging and feature representation, without using extensive musical domain knowledge in the design of this front-end.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11836v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.11836v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-modulation-front-end-for-music-audio","repo_url":"https://github.com/rastegah/modnet","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"audio-tagging","task_name":"Audio Tagging"},{"task_slug":"music-tagging","task_name":"Music Tagging"},{"task_slug":"representation-learning","task_name":"Representation Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}