Hierarchic Models of Hearing for Sound Separation and Reconstruction

In building a machine to detect and segregate individual components in sound mixtures, the best example to copy is the human auditory system. Several models of auditory organization implement various rules of psychoacoustic grouping [Breg90]; we propose in addition to model auditory inference as exhibited in the well-known ‘phonemic restoration illusion’ of [Warr70]. A hierarchy of abstracted features and source hypotheses similar to [Nawa92] allows reconstruction of obliterated detail which can then be used to recreate an ‘idealized’ sound without corruption. A preliminary example of fitting a harmonic model to a noisy recording of a clarinet gives a very convincing resynthesis with the interference totally removed. However, there are many issues including the design of the representation and the control architecture still to be addressed in building a more general system.