I'm learning about signal processing for music right, and what I'm reading keeps using the term features and I find that they never really give a concrete example of what they mean by features. They'll say stuff like features related to timbre, but they won't really go into further depth than that. I also took an image processing class once and found that I didn't really understand it there either. I understand what some literal features of a sound would be, like say distortion, but I have a feeling that this isn't really what they're talking about when they say features.
Example
I'm reading something on Dynamic Time Warping(an algorithm that seems similar to local/global alignment) and they say this
To compare two different features x, y ∈ F, one needs a local cost
measure, sometimes also referred to as a local distance measure, which
is defined to be a function c :F×F → R.
My understanding of Dynamic Time Warping is that two similar waves(?), aligned to each other by measuring the distance between each subsection of one wave to each subsection of the other wave and then choosing the alignment that minimizes the total distance between all the wave sections. I'm doing this for soundwaves, so why are they describing it as comparing two different "features"?
Obviously it can't be described in a way that is 100% tangible, but I'm looking for a description of features that one would be able to draw out or make a picture of.
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