Professionally-produced Music Separation Guided by Covers

This paper addresses the problem of demixing professionally produced music, i.e., recovering the musical source signals that compose a (2-channel stereo) commercial mix signal. Inspired by previous studies using MIDI synthesized or hummed signals as external references, we propose to use the multitrack signals of a cover interpretation to guide the separation process with a relevant initialization. This process is carried out within the framework of the multichannel convolutive NMF model and associated EM/MU estimation algorithms. Although subject to the limitations of the convolutive assumption, our experiments confirm the potential of using multitrack cover signals for source separation of commercial music.