Musical Sound Separation Using Pitch-Based Labeling and Binary Time-Frequency Masking

Monaural musical sound separation attempts to segregate different instrument lines from single-channel polyphonic music. We propose a system that decomposes an input into time-frequency units using an auditory filterbank and utilizes pitch to label which instrument line each time-frequency unit is assigned to. The system is conceptually simple and computationally efficient. Systematic evaluation shows that, despite its simplicity, the proposed system achieves a competitive level of performance.