Figure 2. Schematic of the timbre recognition model.

An acoustic waveform from a test instrument is processed through a model of cochlear and midbrain processing; yielding a time-frequency representation called auditory spectrogram. This later is further processed through the cortical processing stage through neurophysiological or model spectro-temporal receptive fields. Cortical responses of the target instrument are tested against boundaries of a statistical SVM timbre model in order to identify the instrument's identity.