A prototype system for object coding of musical audio

This article deals with low bitrate object coding of musical audio, and more precisely with the extraction of pitched sound objects in polyphonic music. After a brief review of existing methods, we discuss the potential benefits of recasting this problem in a Bayesian framework. We define pitched objects by a set of probabilistic priors and derive efficient algorithms to infer active objects and their parameters. Preliminary experiments suggest that the proposed method results in a better sound quality than simple sinusoidal coding while achieving a lower bitrate.