Research Seminars

Separation of musical sources and structure from single-channel polyphonic recordings

Mark Every, School of Electronics and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey

Wednesday 22 March 2006, 4:00pm, Room 105

Abstract

The focus of this seminar will be the separation of pitched sources/instruments from single-channel polyphonic music, i.e. converting a single-channel recording into a multi-track recording with separated sources. We start by incorporating some prior information about the recording in the form of a MIDI transcription, but discuss ways in which source separation could be performed without any a priori knowledge. A number of heuristic signal processing and adaptive filtering methods will be summarised for separating the harmonic, transient and noise content of any particular pitched note from the original mixture, where it is assumed to be overlapping with similar content from other notes. Finally, an unsupervised feature-based clustering approach to automatically detecting the number of pitched sources in the recording, and identifying each note with a particular source will be discussed.