Crowd's Performance on Temporal Activity Detection of Musical Instruments in Polyphonic Music

Musical instrument recognition enables applications such as instrument-based music search and audio manipulation, which are highly sought-after processes in everyday music consumption and production. Despite continuous progresses, advances in automatic musical instrument recognition is hindered by the lack of large, diverse and publicly available annotated datasets. As studies have shown, there is potential to scale up music data annotation processes through crowdsourcing. However, it is still unclear the extent to which untrained crowdworkers can effectively detect when a musical instrument is active in an audio excerpt. In this study, we explore the performance of non-experts on online crowdsourcing platforms, to detect temporal activity of instruments on audio extracts of selected genres. We study the factors that can affect their performance, while we also analyse user characteristics that could predict their performance. Our results bring further insights into the general crowd's capabilities to detect instruments.