Source separation for live sound

Crosstalk, bleed and interference reduction techniques

Lead researchers: Alice Clifford, Elias Kokkinis and Christian Uhle

This research investigates the reduction of crosstalk between sources in live sound. We have developed three different methods, all focused on live musical applications.The work was done by the Audio Engineering area here at the Centre for Digital Music, and also in collaboration with researchers from the Audio & Acoustic Technology Group, University of Patras and from Fraunhofer IIS .

When multiple microphones are used to reproduce multiple sources microphone interference, or bleed, can occur due to each microphone picking up more than one source. This microphone leakage is one of the most prevalent problems in audio applications involving multiple instruments and microphones. Currently, sound engineers have limited solutions available to them. We have proposed several techniques to suppress the interference, while making little change to the target signal.

The performance of our methods have been examined for environments with various source-microphone setups and it has been shown shown that the proposed approaches efficiently suppress leakage with minimal artifacts.

Demonstration videos

Sound samples

See http://www.wcl.ece.upatras.gr/audiogroup/ekokkinis/index.html for audio samples and description of a Wiener filter approach developed in collaboration with the Audio & Acoustic Technology Group, University of Patras , that removes crosstalk with large numbers of microphones and sources.

The sound samples include suppression of leakage in real recordings with up to 8 sources.

Publications

A. Clifford and J. D. Reiss, "Microphone Interference Reduction in Live Sound," to appear, Proc. of the 14th Int. Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-11), Paris, France, September 19-23, 2011

E. K. Kokkinis, J. D. Reiss and J. Mourjopoulos, "A Wiener Filter Approach to Microphone Leakage Reduction in Close-Microphone Applications," to appear in IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Lang. Proc., 2011.

C. Uhle and J. D. Reiss, "Determined Source Separation for Microphone Recordings Using IIR Filters," 129th AES Convention, San Francisco, Nov. 4-7, 2010.

see also

Alice Clifford and Josh Reiss, ”Calculating time delays of multiple active sources in live sound," 129th AES Convention, San Francisco 2010.

E. K. Kokkinis and J. Mourjopoulos, "Unmixing Acoustic Sources in Real Reverberant Environments for Close-Microphone Applications", J. Aud. Eng. Soc., Vol. 58(11), pp. 907-922, Nov. 2010.