International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

Unifying Local and Global Methods for Harmonic-Percussive Source Separation

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The Hollies - He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother
This excerpt is taken from a 1969 recording of the well-known pop music ballad. The instrumental solo section is played from 03:21 to 03:39. HPSS can be expected to work well with this example since the melodic instruments play very long notes and the drum rhythm is steady and present.
Almost all comparison algorithms deliver reasonable results on this well-behaved example. Our proposed method captures the kick drum better than KAM and Median-Filtering, at the expense of having more leakage from the bass guitar. It is also worthwile to listen to the harmonic estimates since the give a better impression of the attenuation of the drums.
Evolution of the NMF activations

Direct comparison of percussive estimates

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Direct comparison of harmonic estimates

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Oracle: KAM + NMF + Score-Informed Initialization [1,2]

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Proposed: KAM + NMF [1]

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KAM-based HPSS [3,4]

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Median-Filtering HPSS [5]

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Constrained NMF [6]

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References

  1. Christian Dittmar, Patricio López-Serrano, and Meinard Müller
    Unifying Local and Global Methods for Harmonic-Percussive Source Separation
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2018. 
    @inproceedings{DittmarLM18_HPSS_KAM_NMF_ICASSP,
author    = {Christian Dittmar and Patricio L{\'o}pez-Serrano and Meinard M{\"u}ller},
title     = {Unifying Local and Global Methods for Harmonic-Percussive Source Separation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {IEEE} International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ({ICASSP})},
address   = {Calgary, Canada},
month     = {April},
note      = {accepted for publication},
year      = {2018},
}
  2. Sebastian Ewert, Bryan Pardo, Meinard Müller, and Mark Plumbley
    Score-Informed Source Separation for Musical Audio Recordings: An overview
    IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 31(3): 116–124, 2014. PDF 
    @article{EwertPMP14_SourceSeparation_IEEE-SPS,
author    = {Sebastian Ewert and Bryan Pardo and Meinard M{\"u}ller and Mark Plumbley},
title     = {Score-Informed Source Separation for Musical Audio Recordings: An overview},
journal   = {IEEE Signal Processing Magazine},
volume    = {31},
number    = {3},
year      = {2014},
month     = {April},
pages     = {116--124},
url-pdf   = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6784086/},
}
  3. Derry FitzGerald, Antoine Liutkus, Zafar Rafii, Bryan Pardo, and Laurent Daudet
    Harmonic/Percussive Separation Using Kernel Additive Modelling
    In Irish Signals and Systems Conference (IET): 35–40, 2014. PDF 
    @inproceedings{FitzgeraldLRPD14_KAMHP_IET,
title     = {Harmonic/Percussive Separation Using {K}ernel {A}dditive {M}odelling},
author    = {Derry FitzGerald and Antoine Liutkus and  Zafar Rafii and Bryan Pardo and Laurent Daudet},
booktitle = {Irish Signals and Systems Conference ({IET})},
pages     = {35--40},
address   = {Limerick, Ireland},
year      = {2014},
url-pdf   = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6912726/},
}
  4. Christian Dittmar, Jonathan Driedger, Meinard Müller, and Jouni Paulus
    An Experimental Approach to Generalized Wiener Filtering in Music Source Separation
    In Proceedings of the European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2016. PDF 
    @inproceedings{DittmarDMP16_WienerFiltering_EUSIPCO,
author    = {Christian Dittmar and Jonathan Driedger and Meinard M{\"u}ller and Jouni Paulus},
title     = {An Experimental Approach to Generalized Wiener Filtering in Music Source Separation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the European Signal Processing Conference ({EUSIPCO})},
address   = {Budapest, Hungary},
year      = {2016},
pages     = {},
url-pdf   = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7760547/},
}
  5. Derry FitzGerald
    Harmonic/Percussive Separation Using Median Filtering
    In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx): 246–253, 2010. PDF 
    @inproceedings{Fitzgerald10_HarmPercSep_DAFX,
author      = {Derry FitzGerald},
title       = {Harmonic/Percussive Separation Using Median Filtering},
booktitle   = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Audio Effects ({DAFx})},
address     = {Graz, Austria},
year        = {2010},
pages       = {246--253},
url-pdf     = {http://dafx10.iem.at/papers/DerryFitzGerald_DAFx10_P15.pdf},
}
  6. Jeongsoo Park, Jaeyoung Shin, and Kyogu Lee
    Exploiting Continuity/Discontinuity of Basis Vectors in Spectrogram Decomposition for Harmonic-Percussive Sound Separation
    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 25(5): 1061–1074, 2017. PDF 
    @Article{ParkSL17_HPSS_NMF_IEEE-TASLP,
author={Jeongsoo Park and Jaeyoung Shin and Kyogu Lee},
journal={{IEEE/ACM} Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing},
title={Exploiting Continuity/Discontinuity of Basis Vectors in Spectrogram Decomposition for Harmonic-Percussive Sound Separation},
year={2017},
volume={25},
number={5},
pages={1061--1074},
month={May},
url-pdf = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7876808/},
}
  7. Antoine Liutkus and Roland Badeau
    Generalized Wiener filtering with fractional power spectrograms
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP): 266–270, 2015. PDF 
    @inproceedings{LiutkusB15_WienerFilter_ICASSP,
author = {Antoine Liutkus and Roland Badeau},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {IEEE} International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing ({ICASSP})},
title = {Generalized Wiener filtering with fractional power spectrograms},
year = {2015},
month = {April},
pages = {266--270},
address = {Brisbane, Australia},
url-pdf = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7177973/},
}