Single channel speech music separation using nonnegative matrix factorization with sliding windows and spectral masks

A single channel speech-music separation algorithm based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with sliding windows and spectral masks is proposed in this work. We train a set of basis vectors for each source signal using NMF in the magnitude spectral domain. Rather than forming the columns of the matrices to be decomposed by NMF of a single spectral frame, we build them with multiple spectral frames stacked in one column. After observing the mixed signal, NMF is used to decompose its magnitude spectra into a weighted linear combination of the trained basis vectors for both sources. An initial spectrogram estimate for each source is found, and a spectral mask is built using these initial estimates. This mask is used to weight the mixed signal spectrogram to find the contributions of each source signal in the mixed signal. The method is shown to perform better than the conventional NMF approach

Music Information Retrieval: An Inspirational Guide to Transfer from Related Disciplines

The emerging field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has been influenced by neighboring domains in signal processing and machine learning, including automatic speech recognition, image processing and text information retrieval. In this contribution, we start with concrete examples for methodology transfer between speech and music processing, oriented on the building blocks of pattern recognition: preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification/decoding. We then assume a higher level viewpoint when describing sources of mutual inspiration derived from text and image information retrieval. We conclude that dealing with the peculiarities of music in MIR research has contributed to advancing the state-of-the-art in other fields, and that many future challenges in MIR are strikingly similar to those that other research areas have been facing