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Separation of Unvoiced Fricatives in Singing Voice Mixtures with Semi-Supervised NMF

Title Separation of Unvoiced Fricatives in Singing Voice Mixtures with Semi-Supervised NMF
Publication Type Conference Paper
Year of Publication 2013
Conference Name International Conference on Digital Audio Effects Conference (DAFx-13)
Authors Janer, J. , & Marxer R.
Conference Start Date 02/09/2013
Conference Location Maynooth, Ireland
Abstract Separating the singing voice from a musical mixture is a problem widely addressed due to its various applications. However, most approaches do not tackle the separation of unvoiced consonant sounds, which causes a loss of quality in any vocal source separation algorithm, and is especially noticeable for unvoiced fricatives (e.g. /s/, /S/, /T/) due to their energy level and duration. Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. We propose a method to model and separate unvoiced fricative consonants based on a semisupervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization, in which a set of spectral basis components are learnt from a training excerpt. We implemented this method as an extension of an existing well-known factorization approach for singing voice (SIMM). An objective evaluation shows a small improvement in the separation results. Informal listening tests show a significant increase of intelligibility in the isolated vocals.
preprint/postprint document http://dafx13.nuim.ie/papers/07.dafx2013_submission_14.pdf