Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering

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MS Thesis Presentation

 

Musical Instrument Source Separation

 

Melik Berkan Ercan
MS Student
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University

Musical Instrument Source Separation aims to separate the individual instruments from a mixture. We work on unison mixtures where there are two instruments, playing the same constant pitch at the same time. When instruments play at the same pitch, their harmonics overlap that also means that they act as a single source. Therefore, unison mixture case is considered as the fundamental and the hardest case to be solved. We use statistical source separation algorithms, which perform separation by maximizing the statistical independence between the sources. A mixture can be recorded with more than one microphone. This enables us to extract spatial information of the instruments by comparing the recordings. However, we work with the monaural case where there is only one microphone. Some musical instruments have amplitude modulation and this modulation can be seen in the mixtures. We also aim to detect amplitude modulations to support the source separation success. We use NTF (Non-negative Tensor Factorization) to perform the separation. NTF separates the mixture into many components. These components should be clustered in order to synthesize the individual sources. We use k-means as well as manual clustering by comparing the SDR (Signal to Distortion Ratio) values of the components with the original sources.

 

DATE: 11 August, 2014, Monday @ 14:40
PLACE: EA-516