  End-to-end neural network based approaches to audio modelling are generally
outperformed by models trained on high-level data representations. In this
paper we present preliminary work that shows the feasibility of training the
first layers of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model to learn the
commonly-used log-scaled mel-spectrogram transformation. Secondly, we
demonstrate that upon initializing the first layers of an end-to-end CNN
classifier with the learned transformation, convergence and performance on the
ESC-50 environmental sound classification dataset are similar to a CNN-based
model trained on the highly pre-processed log-scaled mel-spectrogram features.
