Separation of Music Signals by Harmonic Structure Modeling

Separation of music signals is an interesting but difficult problem. It is helpful for many other music researches such as audio content analysis. In this paper, a new music signal separation method is proposed, which is based on harmonic structure modeling. The main idea of harmonic structure modeling is that the harmonic structure of a music signal is stable, so a music signal can be represented by a harmonic structure model. Accordingly, a corresponding separation algorithm is proposed. The main idea is to learn a harmonic structure model for each music signal in the mixture, and then separate signals by using these models to distinguish harmonic structures of different signals. Experimental results show that the algorithm can separate signals and obtain not only a very high Signalto-Noise Ratio (SNR) but also a rather good subjective audio quality.