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

Single Channel auditory source separation with neural network

Although distinguishing different sounds in noisy environment is a relative easy task for human, source separation has long been extremely difficult in audio signal processing. The problem is challenging for three reasons: the large variety of sound type, the abundant mixing conditions and the unclear mechanism to distinguish sources, especially for similar sounds. In recent years, the neural network based methods achieved impressive successes in various problems, including the speech enhancement, where the task is to separate the clean speech out of the noise mixture. However, the current deep learning based source separator does not perform well on real recorded noisy speech, and more importantly, is not applicable in a more general source separation scenario such as overlapped speech. In this thesis, we firstly propose extensions for the current mask learning network, for the problem of speech enhancement, to fix the scale mismatch problem which is usually occurred in real recording audio. We solve this problem by combining two additional restoration layers in the existing mask learning network. We also proposed a residual learning architecture for the speech enhancement, further improving the network generalization under different recording conditions. We evaluate the proposed speech enhancement models on CHiME 3 data. Without retraining the acoustic model, the best bi-direction LSTM with residue connections yields 25.13% relative WER reduction on real data and 34.03% WER on simulated data. Then we propose a novel neural network based model called “deep clustering” for more general source separation tasks. We train a deep network to assign contrastive embedding vectors to each time-frequency region of the spectrogram in order to implicitly predict the segmentation labels of the target spectrogram from the input mixtures. This yields a deep network-based analogue to spectral clustering, in that the embeddings form a low-rank pairwise affinity matrix that approximates the ideal affinity matrix, while enabling much faster performance. At test time, the clustering step “decodes” the segmentation implicit in the embeddings by optimizing K-means with respect to the unknown assignments. Experiments on single channel mixtures from multiple speakers show that a speaker-independent model trained on two-speaker and three speakers mixtures can improve signal quality for mixtures of held-out speakers by an average over 10dB. We then propose an extension for deep clustering named “deep attractor” network that allows the system to perform efficient end-to-end training. In the proposed model, attractor points for each source are firstly created the acoustic signals which pull together the time-frequency bins corresponding to each source by finding the centroids of the sources in the embedding space, which are subsequently used to determine the similarity of each bin in the mixture to each source. The network is then trained to minimize the reconstruction error of each source by optimizing the embeddings. We showed that this frame work can achieve even better results. Lastly, we introduce two applications of the proposed models, in singing voice separation and the smart hearing aid device. For the former, a multi-task architecture is proposed, which combines the deep clustering and the classification based network. And a new state of the art separation result was achieved, where the signal to noise ratio was improved by 11.1dB on music and 7.9dB on singing voice. In the application of smart hearing aid device, we combine the neural decoding with the separation network. The system firstly decodes the user’s attention, which is further used to guide the separator for the targeting source. Both objective study and subjective study show the proposed system can accurately decode the attention and significantly improve the user experience

고유 특성을 활용한 음악에서의 보컬 분리

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부, 2018. 2. 이교구.보컬 분리란 음악 신호를 보컬 성분과 반주 성분으로 분리하는 일 또는 그 방법을 의미한다. 이러한 기술은 음악의 특정한 성분에 담겨 있는 정보를 추출하기 위한 전처리 과정에서부터, 보컬 연습과 같이 분리 음원 자체를 활용하는 등의 다양한 목적으로 사용될 수 있다. 본 논문의 목적은 보컬과 반주가 가지고 있는 고유한 특성에 대해 논의하고 그것을 활용하여 보컬 분리 알고리즘들을 개발하는 것이며, 특히 `특징 기반' 이라고 불리는 다음과 같은 상황에 대해 중점적으로 논의한다. 우선 분리 대상이 되는 음악 신호는 단채널로 제공된다고 가정하며, 이 경우 신호의 공간적 정보를 활용할 수 있는 다채널 환경에 비해 더욱 어려운 환경이라고 볼 수 있다. 또한 기계 학습 방법으로 데이터로부터 각 음원의 모델을 추정하는 방법을 배제하며, 대신 저차원의 특성들로부터 모델을 유도하여 이를 목표 함수에 반영하는 방법을 시도한다. 마지막으로, 가사, 악보, 사용자의 안내 등과 같은 외부의 정보 역시 제공되지 않는다고 가정한다. 그러나 보컬 분리의 경우 암묵 음원 분리 문제와는 달리 분리하고자 하는 음원이 각각 보컬과 반주에 해당한다는 최소한의 정보는 제공되므로 각각의 성질들에 대한 분석은 가능하다. 크게 세 종류의 특성이 본 논문에서 중점적으로 논의된다. 우선 연속성의 경우 주파수 또는 시간 측면으로 각각 논의될 수 있는데, 주파수축 연속성의 경우 소리의 음색적 특성을, 시간축 연속성은 소리가 안정적으로 지속되는 정도를 각각 나타낸다고 볼 수 있다. 또한, 저행렬계수 특성은 신호의 구조적 성질을 반영하며 해당 신호가 낮은 행렬계수를 가지는 형태로 표현될 수 있는지를 나타내며, 성김 특성은 신호의 분포 형태가 얼마나 성기거나 조밀한지를 나타낸다. 본 논문에서는 크게 두 가지의 보컬 분리 방법에 대해 논의한다. 첫 번째 방법은 연속성과 성김 특성에 기반을 두고 화성 악기-타악기 분리 방법 (harmonic-percussive sound separation, HPSS) 을 확장하는 방법이다. 기존의 방법이 두 번의 HPSS 과정을 통해 보컬을 분리하는 것에 비해 제안하는 방법은 성긴 잔여 성분을 추가해 한 번의 보컬 분리 과정만을 사용한다. 논의되는 다른 방법은 저행렬계수 특성과 성김 특성을 활용하는 것으로, 반주가 저행렬계수 모델로 표현될 수 있는 반면 보컬은 성긴 분포를 가진다는 가정에 기반을 둔다. 이러한 성분들을 분리하기 위해 강인한 주성분 분석 (robust principal component analysis, RPCA) 을 이용하는 방법이 대표적이다. 본 논문에서는 보컬 분리 성능에 초점을 두고 RPCA 알고리즘을 일반화하거나 확장하는 방식에 대해 논의하며, 트레이스 노름과 l1 노름을 각각 샤텐 p 노름과 lp 노름으로 대체하는 방법, 스케일 압축 방법, 주파수 분포 특성을 반영하는 방법 등을 포함한다. 제안하는 알고리즘들은 다양한 데이터셋과 대회에서 평가되었으며 최신의 보컬 분리 알고리즘들보다 더 우수하거나 비슷한 결과를 보였다.Singing voice separation (SVS) refers to the task or the method of decomposing music signal into singing voice and its accompanying instruments. It has various uses, from the preprocessing step, to extract the musical features implied in the target source, to applications for itself such as vocal training. This thesis aims to discover the common properties of singing voice and accompaniment, and apply it to advance the state-of-the-art SVS algorithms. In particular, the separation approach as follows, which is named `characteristics-based,' is concentrated in this thesis. First, the music signal is assumed to be provided in monaural, or as a single-channel recording. It is more difficult condition compared to multiple-channel recording since spatial information cannot be applied in the separation procedure. This thesis also focuses on unsupervised approach, that does not use machine learning technique to estimate the source model from the training data. The models are instead derived based on the low-level characteristics and applied to the objective function. Finally, no external information such as lyrics, score, or user guide is provided. Unlike blind source separation problems, however, the classes of the target sources, singing voice and accompaniment, are known in SVS problem, and it allows to estimate those respective properties. Three different characteristics are primarily discussed in this thesis. Continuity, in the spectral or temporal dimension, refers the smoothness of the source in the particular aspect. The spectral continuity is related with the timbre, while the temporal continuity represents the stability of sounds. On the other hand, the low-rankness refers how the signal is well-structured and can be represented as a low-rank data, and the sparsity represents how rarely the sounds in signals occur in time and frequency. This thesis discusses two SVS approaches using above characteristics. First one is based on the continuity and sparsity, which extends the harmonic-percussive sound separation (HPSS). While the conventional algorithm separates singing voice by using a two-stage HPSS, the proposed one has a single stage procedure but with an additional sparse residual term in the objective function. Another SVS approach is based on the low-rankness and sparsity. Assuming that accompaniment can be represented as a low-rank model, whereas singing voice has a sparse distribution, conventional algorithm decomposes the sources by using robust principal component analysis (RPCA). In this thesis, generalization or extension of RPCA especially for SVS is discussed, including the use of Schatten p-/lp-norm, scale compression, and spectral distribution. The presented algorithms are evaluated using various datasets and challenges and achieved the better comparable results compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 4 1.2 Applications 5 1.3 Definitions and keywords 6 1.4 Evaluation criteria 7 1.5 Topics of interest 11 1.6 Outline of the thesis 13 Chapter 2 Background 15 2.1 Spectrogram-domain separation framework 15 2.2 Approaches for singing voice separation 19 2.2.1 Characteristics-based approach 20 2.2.2 Spatial approach 21 2.2.3 Machine learning-based approach 22 2.2.4 informed approach 23 2.3 Datasets and challenges 25 2.3.1 Datasets 25 2.3.2 Challenges 26 Chapter 3 Characteristics of music sources 28 3.1 Introduction 28 3.2 Spectral/temporal continuity 29 3.2.1 Continuity of a spectrogram 29 3.2.2 Continuity of musical sources 30 3.3 Low-rankness 31 3.3.1 Low-rankness of a spectrogram 31 3.3.2 Low-rankness of musical sources 33 3.4 Sparsity 34 3.4.1 Sparsity of a spectrogram 34 3.4.2 Sparsity of musical sources 36 3.5 Experiments 38 3.6 Summary 39 Chapter 4 Singing voice separation using continuity and sparsity 43 4.1 Introduction 43 4.2 SVS using two-stage HPSS 45 4.2.1 Harmonic-percussive sound separation 45 4.2.2 SVS using two-stage HPSS 46 4.3 Proposed algorithm 48 4.4 Experimental evaluation 52 4.4.1 MIR-1k Dataset 52 4.4.2 Beach boys Dataset 55 4.4.3 iKala dataset in MIREX 2014 56 4.5 Conclusion 58 Chapter 5 Singing voice separation using low-rankness and sparsity 61 5.1 Introduction 61 5.2 SVS using robust principal component analysis 63 5.2.1 Robust principal component analysis 63 5.2.2 Optimization for RPCA using augmented Lagrangian multiplier method 63 5.2.3 SVS using RPCA 65 5.3 SVS using generalized RPCA 67 5.3.1 Generalized RPCA using Schatten p- and lp-norm 67 5.3.2 Comparison of pRPCA with robust matrix completion 68 5.3.3 Optimization method of pRPCA 69 5.3.4 Discussion of the normalization factor for λ 69 5.3.5 Generalized RPCA using scale compression 71 5.3.6 Experimental results 72 5.4 SVS using RPCA and spectral distribution 73 5.4.1 RPCA with weighted l1-norm 73 5.4.2 Proposed method: SVS using wRPCA 74 5.4.3 Experimental results using DSD100 dataset 78 5.4.4 Comparison with state-of-the-arts in SiSEC 2016 79 5.4.5 Discussion 85 5.5 Summary 86 Chapter 6 Conclusion and Future Work 88 6.1 Conclusion 88 6.2 Contributions 89 6.3 Future work 91 6.3.1 Discovering various characteristics for SVS 91 6.3.2 Expanding to other SVS approaches 92 6.3.3 Applying the characteristics for deep learning models 92 Bibliography 94 초 록 110Docto

Trennung und Schätzung der Anzahl von Audiosignalquellen mit Zeit- und Frequenzüberlappung

Everyday audio recordings involve mixture signals: music contains a mixture of instruments; in a meeting or conference, there is a mixture of human voices. For these mixtures, automatically separating or estimating the number of sources is a challenging task. A common assumption when processing mixtures in the time-frequency domain is that sources are not fully overlapped. However, in this work we consider some cases where the overlap is severe — for instance, when instruments play the same note (unison) or when many people speak concurrently ("cocktail party") — highlighting the need for new representations and more powerful models. To address the problems of source separation and count estimation, we use conventional signal processing techniques as well as deep neural networks (DNN). We first address the source separation problem for unison instrument mixtures, studying the distinct spectro-temporal modulations caused by vibrato. To exploit these modulations, we developed a method based on time warping, informed by an estimate of the fundamental frequency. For cases where such estimates are not available, we present an unsupervised model, inspired by the way humans group time-varying sources (common fate). This contribution comes with a novel representation that improves separation for overlapped and modulated sources on unison mixtures but also improves vocal and accompaniment separation when used as an input for a DNN model. Then, we focus on estimating the number of sources in a mixture, which is important for real-world scenarios. Our work on count estimation was motivated by a study on how humans can address this task, which lead us to conduct listening experiments, confirming that humans are only able to estimate the number of up to four sources correctly. To answer the question of whether machines can perform similarly, we present a DNN architecture, trained to estimate the number of concurrent speakers. Our results show improvements compared to other methods, and the model even outperformed humans on the same task. In both the source separation and source count estimation tasks, the key contribution of this thesis is the concept of “modulation”, which is important to computationally mimic human performance. Our proposed Common Fate Transform is an adequate representation to disentangle overlapping signals for separation, and an inspection of our DNN count estimation model revealed that it proceeds to find modulation-like intermediate features.Im Alltag sind wir von gemischten Signalen umgeben: Musik besteht aus einer Mischung von Instrumenten; in einem Meeting oder auf einer Konferenz sind wir einer Mischung menschlicher Stimmen ausgesetzt. Für diese Mischungen ist die automatische Quellentrennung oder die Bestimmung der Anzahl an Quellen eine anspruchsvolle Aufgabe. Eine häufige Annahme bei der Verarbeitung von gemischten Signalen im Zeit-Frequenzbereich ist, dass die Quellen sich nicht vollständig überlappen. In dieser Arbeit betrachten wir jedoch einige Fälle, in denen die Überlappung immens ist zum Beispiel, wenn Instrumente den gleichen Ton spielen (unisono) oder wenn viele Menschen gleichzeitig sprechen (Cocktailparty) —, so dass neue Signal-Repräsentationen und leistungsfähigere Modelle notwendig sind. Um die zwei genannten Probleme zu bewältigen, verwenden wir sowohl konventionelle Signalverbeitungsmethoden als auch tiefgehende neuronale Netze (DNN). Wir gehen zunächst auf das Problem der Quellentrennung für Unisono-Instrumentenmischungen ein und untersuchen die speziellen, durch Vibrato ausgelösten, zeitlich-spektralen Modulationen. Um diese Modulationen auszunutzen entwickelten wir eine Methode, die auf Zeitverzerrung basiert und eine Schätzung der Grundfrequenz als zusätzliche Information nutzt. Für Fälle, in denen diese Schätzungen nicht verfügbar sind, stellen wir ein unüberwachtes Modell vor, das inspiriert ist von der Art und Weise, wie Menschen zeitveränderliche Quellen gruppieren (Common Fate). Dieser Beitrag enthält eine neuartige Repräsentation, die die Separierbarkeit für überlappte und modulierte Quellen in Unisono-Mischungen erhöht, aber auch die Trennung in Gesang und Begleitung verbessert, wenn sie in einem DNN-Modell verwendet wird. Im Weiteren beschäftigen wir uns mit der Schätzung der Anzahl von Quellen in einer Mischung, was für reale Szenarien wichtig ist. Unsere Arbeit an der Schätzung der Anzahl war motiviert durch eine Studie, die zeigt, wie wir Menschen diese Aufgabe angehen. Dies hat uns dazu veranlasst, eigene Hörexperimente durchzuführen, die bestätigten, dass Menschen nur in der Lage sind, die Anzahl von bis zu vier Quellen korrekt abzuschätzen. Um nun die Frage zu beantworten, ob Maschinen dies ähnlich gut können, stellen wir eine DNN-Architektur vor, die erlernt hat, die Anzahl der gleichzeitig sprechenden Sprecher zu ermitteln. Die Ergebnisse zeigen Verbesserungen im Vergleich zu anderen Methoden, aber vor allem auch im Vergleich zu menschlichen Hörern. Sowohl bei der Quellentrennung als auch bei der Schätzung der Anzahl an Quellen ist ein Kernbeitrag dieser Arbeit das Konzept der “Modulation”, welches wichtig ist, um die Strategien von Menschen mittels Computern nachzuahmen. Unsere vorgeschlagene Common Fate Transformation ist eine adäquate Darstellung, um die Überlappung von Signalen für die Trennung zugänglich zu machen und eine Inspektion unseres DNN-Zählmodells ergab schließlich, dass sich auch hier modulationsähnliche Merkmale finden lassen

Audio Source Separation with Discriminative Scattering Networks

In this report we describe an ongoing line of research for solving single-channel source separation problems. Many monaural signal decomposition techniques proposed in the literature operate on a feature space consisting of a time-frequency representation of the input data. A challenge faced by these approaches is to effectively exploit the temporal dependencies of the signals at scales larger than the duration of a time-frame. In this work we propose to tackle this problem by modeling the signals using a time-frequency representation with multiple temporal resolutions. The proposed representation consists of a pyramid of wavelet scattering operators, which generalizes Constant Q Transforms (CQT) with extra layers of convolution and complex modulus. We first show that learning standard models with this multi-resolution setting improves source separation results over fixed-resolution methods. As study case, we use Non-Negative Matrix Factorizations (NMF) that has been widely considered in many audio application. Then, we investigate the inclusion of the proposed multi-resolution setting into a discriminative training regime. We discuss several alternatives using different deep neural network architectures

Statistical Approaches for Signal Processing with Application to Automatic Singer Identification

In the music world, the oldest instrument is known as the singing voice that plays an important role in musical recordings. The singer\u27s identity serves as a primary aid for people to organize, browse, and retrieve music recordings. In this thesis, we focus on the problem of singer identification based on the acoustic features of singing voice. An automatic singer identification system is constructed and has achieved a very high identification accuracy. This system consists of three crucial parts: singing voice detection, background music removal and pattern recognition. These parts are introduced and explored in great details in this thesis. To be specific, in terms of the singing voice detection, we firstly study a traditional method, double GMM. Then an improved method, namely single GMM, is proposed. The experimental result shows that the detection accuracy of single GMM can be achieved as high as 96.42%. In terms of the background music removal, Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) are demonstrated. The evaluation result shows that RPCA outperforms NMF. In terms of pattern recognition, we explore the algorithms of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Based on the experimental results, it turns out that the prediction accuracy of GMM classifier is about 16% higher than SVM