Abstract: An audio information retrieval model based on Manifold Ranking (MR) is proposed, and ranking results
are improved using a Relevance Feedback (RF) algorithm. Timbre components are employed as the model’s main
feature. To compute timbre similarity, extracting the spectrum features for each frame is necessary; the large set
of frames is clustered using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and expectation maximization. The typical spectra
frame from GMM is drawn as data points, and MR assigns each data point a relative ranking score, which is
treated as a distance instead of as traditional similarity metrics based on pair-wise distance. Furthermore, the MR
algorithm can be easily generalized by adding positive and negative examples from the RF algorithm and improves
the final result. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively improves the ranking capabilities
of existing distance functions.