Extending Harmonic-Percussive Separation of Audio Signals

In recent years, methods to decompose an audio signal into a harmonic and a percussive component have received a lot of interest and are frequently applied as a processing step in a variety of scenarios. One problem is that the computed components are often not of purely harmonic or percussive nature but also contain noise-like sounds that are neither clearly harmonic nor percussive. Furthermore, depending on the parameter settings, one often can observe a leakage of harmonic sounds into the percussive component and vice versa. In this paper we present two extensions to a state-of-the-art harmonic-percussive separation procedure to target these problems. First, we introduce a separation factor parameter into the decomposition process that allows for tightening separation results and for enforcing the components to be clearly harmonic or percussive. As second contribution, inspired by the classical sines+transients+noise (STN) audio model, this novel concept is exploited to add a third residual component to the decomposition which captures the sounds that lie in between the clearly harmonic and percussive sounds of the audio signal.