Very first thing to do: there is literature describing systems doing exactly what you want to do. Look for it!
Your suggested approach - representing the sequence as a feature vector of dimension $n$ where $n$ is the number of onsets or beats - has many flaws:
- What if you want to classify sequences which are longer/shorter than your training samples?
- What if the onset detector skips an event or detects a spurious event, and the entire vector is shifted left or right?
- What about timing information, which is essential in the perception of rhythm!
- A single real number computed from the spectrogram is unlikely to represent well the musicological dimension that matters to your problem (which "stroke" or "bol" has been played on the tabla).
Strings/sequence matching methods are more likely to be what you need. What matters to your classification problem is "what follows what" rather than "what happens at the $n$-th position" - because the concept of "$n$-th" position is not very robust, and also very relative.
Here's how I would approach the problem:
- Detect onsets on your audio signal, and for each onset, compute a vector of timbral features (MFCCs will be fine). At this point you have a sequence of onset times and a sequence of feature vectors.
- On your entire training database, train a vector-quantizer with a small-ish codebook (say 16 or 32 vectors) on the feature vectors. There's a good chance that it will map well to the tabla bols ('dha', 'ti', 're', 'tin'...) - each codeword will correspond to a distinct tabla stroke.
- Quantize your data using this vector quantizer. Your sequences will now be represented as a list of onset times and codeword id [(0.0, codeword_10), (0.51, codeword_7), (1.02, codeword_7), (1.27, codeword_16), (1.52, codeword_17), (2.03, codeword_10)...] etc.
- Use a classic tactus/tatum detection algorithm (they use inter-onset times as their input) to recover the temporal structure of the rhythm. This will allow you to group events into matras. The example above will become: codeword_10, codeword_7, codeword_7, codeword_16|codeword_17, codeword_10 (note the grouping - the fourth and fifth events are played in sequence within the same matra).
- Use any string/sequence modelling technique on the representation above:
- Transforming the sequence obtained at step 4 into a sparse vector of n-gram counts is the most flexible method, since it allows you to use any text machine learning technique. The downside is that it needs lots of training data and works well on rather long sequences.
- You can also use HMMs. Collect a small corpus of sequences in various taal, train a HMM on them for each taal; use the HMM to compute the likelihood of each of the taal models given the observed sequence.
- Another option is to use an edit distance on the sequence obtained at step 4, in conjunction with nearest-neighbour classification. Compute the edit distance between the sequence to classify, and sequences representative of each of the different taals. Pick the taal with the smallest edit distance.
Note that if you have time to invest in manual annotation, steps 2 and 3 can be replaced by a supervised classifier: annotate a database of table sounds with the name or 'bol' of each stroke ('dha', 'dhin', 'ti', 're'...). Train a classifier from audio features (say MFCC) into bols. Use this classifier at step 3. You will now be able to work with a very meaningful representation of your sequences.
A final note: There's a good chance that step 5 can be done with a handful of rules, rather than through machine learning. I know the entire purpose of your project is to do tala recognition with machine-learning; but what is the point if a bit of musicological knowledge can do the same job? What machine learning can do is transcribe the audio signal into a symbolic representation (a sequence of bols) - but further processing of this representation to extract meaningful musicological properties/categories does not necessarily require machine learning techniques...
