  The ConditionaL Neural Network (CLNN) exploits the nature of the temporal
sequencing of the sound signal represented in a spectrogram, and its variant
the Masked ConditionaL Neural Network (MCLNN) induces the network to learn in
frequency bands by embedding a filterbank-like sparseness over the network's
links using a binary mask. Additionally, the masking automates the exploration
of different feature combinations concurrently analogous to handcrafting the
optimum combination of features for a recognition task. We have evaluated the
MCLNN performance using the Urbansound8k dataset of environmental sounds.
Additionally, we present a collection of manually recorded sounds for rail and
road traffic, YorNoise, to investigate the confusion rates among machine
generated sounds possessing low-frequency components. MCLNN has achieved
competitive results without augmentation and using 12% of the trainable
parameters utilized by an equivalent model based on state-of-the-art
Convolutional Neural Networks on the Urbansound8k. We extended the Urbansound8k
dataset with YorNoise, where experiments have shown that common tonal
properties affect the classification performance.
