Perceptually Motivated Approaches to Music Restoration

Spurred by the success of perceptual models in audio coding applications, researchers have recently begun to address audio signal enhancement in a similar manner. Here we consider the case of musical recordings degraded by additive broadband noise such as tape hiss, in which the prevention of signal distortion is tantamount to noise removal. We review perceptually motivated approaches to music restoration and describe a statistical model based framework we have recently proposed. By integrating psychoacoustics into the restoration process through the use of perceptual optimality criteria, our method aims to take advantage of human auditory perception to yield improvements in both noise reduction and perceived signal fidelity. Audio examples and related software may be found at http://www-sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk/ pjw47.