Patent ID: 7091409

Claim:
A method for automatically forming a feature set describing an electronic signal representing a piece of music, the method comprising: (a) receiving the electronic signal into a computing device; (b) performing a wavelet decomposition of the electronic signal to obtain a plurality of wavelet coefficients in a plurality of subbands; (c) forming a histogram of the wavelet coefficients in each of the subbands; (d) calculating an average, variance and skewness of each of the histograms; (e) calculating a subband energy of each of the histograms; and (f) forming the feature set such that the feature set comprises the average, variance, skewness, and subband energy of at least some of the subbands, wherein step (f) comprises forming the feature set such that the feature set comprises the average, variance, skewness, and subband energy of fewer than all of the subbands.