Most singer identification methods are processed in the frequency domain, which potentially leads to information loss during the spectral transformation. In this paper, instead of the frequency domain, we propose an end-to-end architecture that addresses this problem in the waveform domain. An encoder based on Multi-scale Dilated Convolution Neural Networks (MDCNN) was introduced to generate wave embedding from the raw audio signal. Specifically, dilated convolution layers are used in the proposed method to enlarge the receptive field, aiming to extract song-level features. Furthermore, skip connection in the backbone network integrates the multi-resolution acoustic features learned by the stack of convolution layers. Then, the obtained wave embedding is passed into the following networks for singer identification. In experiments, the proposed method achieves comparable performance on the benchmark dataset of Artist20, which significantly improves related works.
Previous attempts at music artist classification use frame level audio features which summarize frequency content within short intervals of time. Comparatively, more recent music information retrieval tasks take advantage of temporal structure in audio spectrograms using deep convolutional and recurrent models. This paper revisits artist classification with this new framework and empirically explores the impacts of incorporating temporal structure in the feature representation. To this end, an established classification architecture, a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), is applied to the artist20 music artist identification dataset under a comprehensive set of conditions. These include audio clip length, which is a novel contribution in this work, and previously identified considerations such as dataset split and feature level. Our results improve upon baseline works, verify the influence of the producer effect on classification performance and demonstrate the trade-offs between audio length and training set size. The best performing model achieves an average F1 score of 0.937 across three independent trials which is a substantial improvement over the corresponding baseline under similar conditions. Additionally, to showcase the effectiveness of the CRNN's feature extraction capabilities, we visualize audio samples at the model's bottleneck layer demonstrating that learned representations segment into clusters belonging to their respective artists.