Musical source separation using time-frequency source priors

This article deals with the source separation problem for stereo musical mixtures using prior information about the sources (instrument names and localization). After a brief review of existing methods, we design a family of probabilistic mixture generative models combining modified positive independent subspace analysis (ISA), localization models, and segmental models (SM). We express source separation as a Bayesian estimation problem and we propose efficient resolution algorithms. The resulting separation methods rely on a variable number of cues including harmonicity, spectral envelope, azimuth, note duration, and monophony. We compare these methods on two synthetic mixtures with long reverberation. We show that they outperform methods exploiting spatial diversity only and that they are robust against approximate localization of the sources.