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Main Authors: AL-Makhlafi, Moeen, AlKannad, Abdulrahman A., Almekhlafi, Eiad, Mohammed, Nawaf Q. Othman Ahmed, Qaid, Saher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05011
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author AL-Makhlafi, Moeen
AlKannad, Abdulrahman A.
Almekhlafi, Eiad
Mohammed, Nawaf Q. Othman Ahmed
Qaid, Saher
author_facet AL-Makhlafi, Moeen
AlKannad, Abdulrahman A.
Almekhlafi, Eiad
Mohammed, Nawaf Q. Othman Ahmed
Qaid, Saher
contents Automatic music genre classification is a major task in music information retrieval; however, most current benchmarks and models have been developed primarily for Western music, leaving culturally specific traditions underrepresented. In this paper, we introduce the Yemeni Music Information Retrieval (YMIR) dataset, which contains 1,475 carefully selected audio clips covering five traditional Yemeni genres: Sanaani, Hadhrami, Lahji, Tihami, and Adeni. The dataset was labeled by five Yemeni music experts following a clear and structured protocol, resulting in strong inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss kappa = 0.85). We also propose the Yemeni Music Classification Model (YMCM), a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based system designed to classify music genres from time-frequency features. Using a consistent preprocessing pipeline, we perform a systematic comparison across six experimental groups and five different architectures, resulting in a total of 30 experiments. Specifically, we evaluate several feature representations, including Mel-spectrograms, Chroma, FilterBank, and MFCCs with 13, 20, and 40 coefficients, and benchmark YMCM against standard models (AlexNet, VGG16, MobileNet, and a baseline CNN) under the same experimental conditions. The experimental findings reveal that YMCM is the most effective, achieving the highest accuracy of 98.8% with Mel-spectrogram features. The results also provide practical insights into the relationship between feature representation and model capacity. The findings establish YMIR as a useful benchmark and YMCM as a strong baseline for classifying Yemeni music genres.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_05011
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle YMIR: A new Benchmark Dataset and Model for Arabic Yemeni Music Genre Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks
AL-Makhlafi, Moeen
AlKannad, Abdulrahman A.
Almekhlafi, Eiad
Mohammed, Nawaf Q. Othman Ahmed
Qaid, Saher
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Automatic music genre classification is a major task in music information retrieval; however, most current benchmarks and models have been developed primarily for Western music, leaving culturally specific traditions underrepresented. In this paper, we introduce the Yemeni Music Information Retrieval (YMIR) dataset, which contains 1,475 carefully selected audio clips covering five traditional Yemeni genres: Sanaani, Hadhrami, Lahji, Tihami, and Adeni. The dataset was labeled by five Yemeni music experts following a clear and structured protocol, resulting in strong inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss kappa = 0.85). We also propose the Yemeni Music Classification Model (YMCM), a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based system designed to classify music genres from time-frequency features. Using a consistent preprocessing pipeline, we perform a systematic comparison across six experimental groups and five different architectures, resulting in a total of 30 experiments. Specifically, we evaluate several feature representations, including Mel-spectrograms, Chroma, FilterBank, and MFCCs with 13, 20, and 40 coefficients, and benchmark YMCM against standard models (AlexNet, VGG16, MobileNet, and a baseline CNN) under the same experimental conditions. The experimental findings reveal that YMCM is the most effective, achieving the highest accuracy of 98.8% with Mel-spectrogram features. The results also provide practical insights into the relationship between feature representation and model capacity. The findings establish YMIR as a useful benchmark and YMCM as a strong baseline for classifying Yemeni music genres.
title YMIR: A new Benchmark Dataset and Model for Arabic Yemeni Music Genre Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05011