FFT and Music Comparison

Question

I'm trying to play around with some music clustering algorithms, and I thought that using a feature vector consisting of basically a discretized fft (like discretize the frequencies) would be a good similarity measure. Would this even be useful? Do people know what some good audio similarity measures might be?

Answer 1

First of all, you need to decide whether you want fingerprinting (i.e. identity except for some distortion) or similarity (but not identity!) measures.

Also have a look at MFCC, bark scales and so on. There is plenty of literature out there. Go to Amazon, and grab a dedicated book on this topic.

Answer 2

You can use a hierarchical cluster like a kd-tree or a hilbert curve before you discretize. A cluster reduces the dimension complexity and change the order of the input while a fft just transform it to waves.