# Goniometers are a Powerful Acoustic Feature for Music Information Retrieval Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01090 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01090/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SOMson -- Sonification of Multidimensional Data in Kohonen Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00016/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Goniometers, also known as Phase Scopes or Vector Scopes, are audio metering tools that help music producers and mixing engineers monitor spatial aspects of a music mix, such as the stereo panorama, the width of single sources, the amount and diffuseness of reverberation as well as phase cancellations that may occur on the sweet-spot and in a mono-mixdown. In addition, they implicitly inform about the dynamics of the sound. Self-organizing maps trained with a goniometer, are consulted to explore the usefulness of this acoustic feature for music information retrieval tasks. One can see that goniometers are able to classify different genres and cluster a single album. The advantage of goniometers is the causality: Music producers and mixing engineers consciously consult goniometers to reach their desired sound, which is not the case for other acoustic features, from Zero-Crossing Rate to Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients.