Convolutional Composer Classification

The composer classification question has been posed for a variety of corpora, from Renaissance composers [2,3], to the narrow (and challenging) case of Haydn and Mozart string quartets [5, 8, 12, 22], and to various collections of classical era composers (most of the other papers discussed in Section 2). In this work we study an expansive collection of scores, from 13th century sacred music by Guillaume Du Fay to 20th century ragtimes by Scott Joplin. A major challenge of this task is learning from limited data. While the corpus considered here is larger than most, this is largely due to the number of composers considered (19): for specific composers, we have at most 466 scores (Bach) and as few as 22 (Japart). Small datasets are an inherent problem for composer classification: the corpus used in this work contains, for example, all of the Bach chorales and all of the Mozart string quartets. We cannot resurrect these composers and have them write us more scores to include in our corpus. This situation contrasts starkly with many learning problems, where substantial progress can be made by collecting massive datasets and exhaustively training an expressive model (usually a deep neural network) with "big data."