Musical instrument sound source separation

Abstract

The structured arrangement of sounds in musical pieces, results in the unique creation of complex acoustic mixtures. The analysis of these mixtures, with the objective of estimating the individual sounds which constitute them, is known as musical instrument sound source separation, and has applications in audio coding, audio restoration, music production, music information retrieval and music education.

This thesis principally addresses the issues related to the separation of harmonic musical instrument sound sources in single-channel mixtures. The contributions presented in this work include novel separation methods which exploit the characteristic structure and inherent correlations of pitched sound sources; as well as an exploration of the musical timbre space, for the development of an objective distortion metric to evaluate the perceptual quality of separated sources.

The separation methods presented in this work address the concordant nature of musical mixtures using a model-based paradigm. Model parameters are estimated for each source, beginning with a novel, computationally efficient algorithm for the refinement of frequency estimates of the detected harmonics. Harmonic tracks are formed, and overlapping components are resolved by exploiting spectro-temporal intra-instrument dependencies, integrating the spectral and temporal approaches which are currently employed in a mutually exclusive manner in existing systems. Subsequent to the harmonic magnitude extraction using this method, a unique, closed-loop approach to source synthesis is presented, separating sources by iteratively minimizing the aggregate error of the sources, constraining the minimization to a set of estimated parameters. The proposed methods are evaluated independently, and then are placed within the context of a source separation system, which is evaluated using objective and subjective measures.

The evaluation of music source separation systems is presently limited by the simplicity of objective measures, and the extensive effort required to conduct subjective evaluations. To contribute to the development of perceptually relevant evaluations, three psychoacoustic experiments are also presented, exploring the perceptual sensitivity of timbre for the development of an objective distortion metric for timbre. The experiments investigate spectral envelope sensitivity, spectral envelope morphing and noise sensitivity.