This paper presents the classification of musical instruments using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Higher Order Spectral features. MFCC, cepstral, temporal, spectral, and timbral features have been widely used in the task of musical instrument classification. As music sound signal is generated using non-linear dynamics, non-linearity and non-Gaussianity of the musical instruments are important features which have not been considered in the past. In this paper, hybridisation of MFCC and Higher Order Spectral (HOS) based features have been used in the task of musical instrument classification. HOS-based features have been used to provide instrument specific information such as non-Gaussianity and non-linearity of the musical instruments. The extracted features have been presented to Counter Propagation Neural Network (CPNN) to identify the instruments and their family. For experimentation, isolated sounds of 19 musical instruments have been used from McGill University Master Sample (MUMS) sound database. The proposed features show the significant improvement in the classification accuracy of the system.

Measurement of vital signs of the human body such as heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and respiratory rate is an important part of diagnosing medical conditions and these are usually measured using medical equipment. In this paper, we propose to estimate an important vital sign – heart rate from speech signals using machine learning algorithms. Existing literature, observation and experience suggest the existence of a correlation between speech characteristics and physiological, psychological as well as emotional conditions. In this work, we estimate the heart rate of individuals by applying machine learning based regression algorithms to Mel frequency cepstrum coefficients, which represent speech features in the spectral domain as well as the temporal variation of spectral features. The estimated heart rate is compared with actual measurement made using a conventional medical device at the time of recording speech. We obtain estimation accuracy close to 94% between the estimated and actual measured heart rate values. Binary classification of heart rate as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ is also achieved with 100% accuracy. A comparison of machine learning algorithms in terms of heart rate estimation and classification accuracy is also presented. Heart rate measurement using speech has applications in remote monitoring of patients, professional athletes and can facilitate telemedicine.

Speech recognition system extract the textual data from the speech signal. The research in speech recognition domain is challenging due to the large variabilities involved with the speech signal. Variety of signal processing and machine learning techniques have been explored to achieve better recognition accuracy. Speech is highly non-stationary in nature and therefore analysis is carried out by considering short time-domain window or frame. In the speech recognition task, cepstral (Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC)) features are commonly used and are extracted for short time-frame. The effectiveness of features depend upon duration of the time-window chosen. The present study is aimed at investigation of optimal time-window duration for extraction of cepstral features in the context of speech recognition task. A speaker independent speech recognition system for the Kannada language has been considered for the analysis. In the current work, speech utterances of Kannada news corpus recorded from different speakers have been used to create speech database. The hidden Markov tool kit (HTK) has been used to implement the speech recognition system. The MFCC along with their first and second derivative coefficients are considered as feature vectors. Pronunciation dictionary required for the study has been built manually for mono-phone system. Experiments have been carried out and results have been analyzed for different time-window lengths. The overlapping Hamming window has been considered in this study. The best average word recognition accuracy of 61.58% has been obtained for a window length of 110 msec duration. This recognition accuracy is comparable with the similar work found in literature. The experiments have shown that best word recognition performance can be achieved by tuning the window length to its optimum value.