Phase-aware Harmonic/Percussive Source Separation via Convex Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a phase-aware harmonic/percussive source separation method using convex optimization in the time domain, effectively handling both amplitude and phase for improved audio decomposition.

Contribution

It presents a novel convex optimization approach that incorporates phase information for harmonic/percussive source separation, advancing beyond traditional power spectrogram-based methods.

Findings

Effective separation of harmonic and percussive components

Improved audio quality in reconstructed signals

Validated through numerical experiments

Abstract

Decomposition of an audio mixture into harmonic and percussive components, namely harmonic/percussive source separation (HPSS), is a useful pre-processing tool for many audio applications. Popular approaches to HPSS exploit the distinctive source-specific structures of power spectrograms. However, such approaches consider only power spectrograms, and the phase remains intact for resynthesizing the separated signals. In this paper, we propose a phase-aware HPSS method based on the structure of the phase of harmonic components. It is formulated as a convex optimization problem in the time domain, which enables the simultaneous treatment of both amplitude and phase. The numerical experiment validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.