Designing efficient architectures for modeling temporal features with convolutional neural networks

Many researchers use convolutional neural networks with small rectangular filters for music (spectrograms) classification. First, we discuss why there is no reason to use this filters setup by default and second, we point that more efficient architectures could be implemented if the characteristics of the music features are considered during the design process. Specifically, we propose a novel design strategy that might promote more expressive and intuitive deep learning architectures by efficiently exploiting the representational capacity of the first layer - using different filter shapes adapted to fit musical concepts within the first layer. The proposed architectures are assessed by measuring their accuracy in predicting the classes of the Ballroom dataset. We also make available¹ the used code (together with the audio-data) so that this research is fully reproducible.