Similarity Evaluation of Violin Directivity Patterns for Musical Instrument Retrieval

The directivity of a musical instrument is a function that describes the spatial characteristics of its sound radiation. The majority of the available literature focuses on measuring directivity patterns, with analysis mainly limited to visual inspections. Recently, some similarity metrics for directivity patterns have been introduced, yet their application has not being fully addressed. In this work, we introduce the problem of musical instrument retrieval based on the directivity pattern features. We aim to exploit the available similarity metrics for directivity patterns in order to determine distances between instruments. We apply the methodology to a data set of violin directivities, including historical and modern high-quality instruments. Results show that the methodology facilitates the comparison of musical instruments and the navigation of databases of directivity patterns.