MADS: A Multiview Acoustic Descriptor Set Beyond Standard Spectral Summaries

arXiv:2609.00792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dominant audio classification pipelines rely either on compact handcrafted summaries or on fixed time-frequency frontends such as log-mel representations prior to deep modeling. While highly successful, these representations do not explicitly expose the physical dynamics of the underlying sound-generating event. We introduce MADS (Multi-view Acoustic Descriptor Set), a compact 19-dimensional physics-informed descriptor set de- signed to capture complementary spectral, temporal, mechanical, and stochastic structure in audio signals. Rather than treating sound only as a spectral pattern, MADS encodes properties related to excitation, damping, periodicity, impulsiveness, and structural consistency within a unified multi-view representation. We evaluate MADS using standard classical machine learning models on ESC-10, ESC-50, and MSoS, and compare it against two conventional handcrafted baselines: a compact 26D MFCC- based baseline and an expanded 38D spectral-summary baseline. Across ESC-10 and ESC-50, MADS achieves the strongest peak results overall, reaching 81.00% and 52.78%, respectively, while using roughly half the dimensionality of the 38D baseline. On MSoS, MADS again delivers the strongest top-end performance, reaching 67.48%. These results establish MADS not merely as a competitive standalone descriptor set, but as the foundational descriptor layer of a broader acoustically grounded representation program for future frame-level and deep-learning-compatible audio modeling.

Abstract:Dominant audio classification pipelines rely either on compact handcrafted summaries or on fixed time-frequency frontends such as log-mel representations prior to deep modeling. While highly successful, these representations do not explicitly expose the physical dynamics of the underlying sound-generating event. We introduce MADS (Multi-view Acoustic Descriptor Set), a compact 19-dimensional physics-informed descriptor set de- signed to capture complementary spectral, temporal, mechanical, and stochastic structure in audio signals. Rather than treating sound only as a spectral pattern, MADS encodes properties related to excitation, damping, periodicity, impulsiveness, and structural consistency within a unified multi-view representation. We evaluate MADS using standard classical machine learning models on ESC-10, ESC-50, and MSoS, and compare it against two conventional handcrafted baselines: a compact 26D MFCC- based baseline and an expanded 38D spectral-summary baseline. Across ESC-10 and ESC-50, MADS achieves the strongest peak results overall, reaching 81.00% and 52.78%, respectively, while using roughly half the dimensionality of the 38D baseline. On MSoS, MADS again delivers the strongest top-end performance, reaching 67.48%. These results establish MADS not merely as a competitive standalone descriptor set, but as the foundational descriptor layer of a broader acoustically grounded representation program for future frame-level and deep-learning-compatible audio modeling.

Sound (cs.SD); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)

arXiv:2609.00792 [cs.SD]

(or arXiv:2609.00792v1 [cs.SD] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00792 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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MADS: A Multiview Acoustic Descriptor Set Beyond Standard Spectral Summaries

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