40 research outputs found
Deep Clustering and Conventional Networks for Music Separation: Stronger Together
Deep clustering is the first method to handle general audio separation
scenarios with multiple sources of the same type and an arbitrary number of
sources, performing impressively in speaker-independent speech separation
tasks. However, little is known about its effectiveness in other challenging
situations such as music source separation. Contrary to conventional networks
that directly estimate the source signals, deep clustering generates an
embedding for each time-frequency bin, and separates sources by clustering the
bins in the embedding space. We show that deep clustering outperforms
conventional networks on a singing voice separation task, in both matched and
mismatched conditions, even though conventional networks have the advantage of
end-to-end training for best signal approximation, presumably because its more
flexible objective engenders better regularization. Since the strengths of deep
clustering and conventional network architectures appear complementary, we
explore combining them in a single hybrid network trained via an approach akin
to multi-task learning. Remarkably, the combination significantly outperforms
either of its components.Comment: Published in ICASSP 201
A Recurrent Encoder-Decoder Approach with Skip-filtering Connections for Monaural Singing Voice Separation
The objective of deep learning methods based on encoder-decoder architectures
for music source separation is to approximate either ideal time-frequency masks
or spectral representations of the target music source(s). The spectral
representations are then used to derive time-frequency masks. In this work we
introduce a method to directly learn time-frequency masks from an observed
mixture magnitude spectrum. We employ recurrent neural networks and train them
using prior knowledge only for the magnitude spectrum of the target source. To
assess the performance of the proposed method, we focus on the task of singing
voice separation. The results from an objective evaluation show that our
proposed method provides comparable results to deep learning based methods
which operate over complicated signal representations. Compared to previous
methods that approximate time-frequency masks, our method has increased
performance of signal to distortion ratio by an average of 3.8 dB
Improving the perceptual quality of ideal binary masked speech
It is known that applying a time-frequency binary mask to very noisy speech can improve its intelligibility but results in poor perceptual quality. In this paper we propose a new approach to applying a binary mask that combines the intelligibility gains of conventional binary masking with the perceptual quality gains of a classical speech enhancer. The binary mask is not applied directly as a time-frequency gain as in most previous studies. Instead, the mask is used to supply prior information to a classical speech enhancer about the probability of speech presence in different time-frequency regions. Using an oracle ideal binary mask, we show that the proposed method results in a higher predicted quality than other methods of applying a binary mask whilst preserving the improvements in predicted intelligibility