Unison Sound Separation Using Localized Extended Common Amplitude Modulation

Abstract

Musical source separation isolates one or more musical instruments from a polyphonic mixture. The main challenge is to separate the source partials overlapped in the same time–frequency region. For the unison case, the source separation task is quite difficult because no source has nonoverlapping partials. Owing to the lack of effective methods in monaural unison sound separation, this paper proposes a localized extended common amplitude modulation (LECAM) method. Our strategy assumes that partials from the same source have correlated amplitude envelopes in a period of time and use a multi-band co-processing way for separating each source partial. Extensive experiments are conducted on unison mixture samples drawn from the Iowa University Musical Instrument Database. Results demonstrate that our LECAM achieves the overall best separation performance.