A simple music/voice separation method based on the extraction of the repeating musical structure

Zafar Rafii*, Bryan A Pardo

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

64 Scopus citations

Abstract

Repetition is a core principle in music. This is especially true for popular songs, generally marked by a noticeable repeating musical structure, over which the singer performs varying lyrics. On this basis, we propose a simple method for separating music and voice, by extraction of the repeating musical structure. First, the period of the repeating structure is found. Then, the spectrogram is segmented at period boundaries and the segments are averaged to create a repeating segment model. Finally, each time-frequency bin in a segment is compared to the model, and the mixture is partitioned using binary time-frequency masking by labeling bins similar to the model as the repeating background. Evaluation on a dataset of 1,000 song clips showed that this method can improve on the performance of an existing music/voice separation method without requiring particular features or complex frameworks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2011 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2011 - Proceedings
Pages221-224
Number of pages4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event36th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2011 - Prague, Czech Republic
Duration: May 22 2011May 27 2011

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Other

Other36th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2011
Country/TerritoryCzech Republic
CityPrague
Period5/22/115/27/11

Keywords

  • Binary Time-Frequency Masking
  • Music/Voice Separation
  • Repeating Pattern

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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