Exploration of the additivity approximation for spectral magnitudes

The separation of acoustic signals is often accomplished through subtractive decompositions of frequency-domain representations. This is typically enabled by the zero phase approximation or the un-correlated signals approximation but both of these are very coarse approximations in the mathematical sense. We investigate this disconnect between what works in practice and what is mathematically correct. We conduct a broad search for a domain where the addi-tivity of spectral magnitudes is best satisfied. We apply objective estimators to time-domain reconstructions to characterize the true auditory impact of the magnitude additivity approximation. Our results show the auditory impacts of additivity approximations and allow comparison with the impact of using mixture phase and exact magnitudes in the time-domain reconstruction.