Comparative evaluations of various harmonic/percussive sound separation algorithms based on anisotropic continuity of spectrogram

In this paper, we explore several algorithms to find the best performing algorithm for harmonic and percussive sound separation (HPSS) based on anisotropic continuity of spectrogram through comparative evaluation of their experimental performance. Separating harmonic and percussive sounds is useful as a preprocessor for many music analysis purposes including chord estimation, rhythm analysis, and other music information retrieval tasks. We have introduced a method called “Harmonic/Percussive Sound Separation” (HPSS), that decomposes a music signal into two components by separating the spectrogram into horizontally-continuous and vertically-continuous components, which roughly correspond to harmonic and percussive sounds, respectively. Many possible ways exist to realize the HPSS algorithm based on this concept while it has been unknown which algorithm performs best. This paper describes the details of five different HPSS algorithms and compares their performances over real music signals.