Music source separation is the task of separating musical sources from an audio mixture. It has various direct applications including automatic karaoke generation, enhancing musical recordings, and 3D-audio upmixing; but also has implications for other downstream music information retrieval tasks such as multi-instrument transcription. However, the majority of research has focused on fixed stem separation of vocals, drums, and bass stems. While such models have highlighted capabilities of source separation using deep learning, their implications are limited to very few use cases. Such models are unable to separate most other instruments due to insufficient training data. Moreover, class-based separation inherently limits the applicability of such models to be unable to separate monotimbral mixtures. This thesis focuses on separating musical sources without requiring timbral distinction among the sources. Preliminary attempts focus on the separation of vocal harmonies from choral ensembles using ...

The amount of digital music available both on the Internet and by each listener has considerably raised for about ten years. The organization and the accessibillity of this amount of data demand that additional informations are available, such as artist, album and song names, musical genre, tempo, mood or other symbolic or semantic attributes. Automatic music indexing has thus become a challenging research area. If some tasks are now correctly handled for certain types of music, such as automatic genre classification for stereotypical music, music instrument recoginition on solo performance and tempo extraction, others are more difficult to perform. For example, automatic transcription of polyphonic signals and instrument ensemble recognition are still limited to some particular cases. The goal of our study is not to obain a perfect transcription of the signals and an exact classification of all the instruments ...

When listening to music, some humans can easily recognize which instruments play at what time or when a new musical segment starts, but cannot describe exactly how they do this. To automatically describe particular aspects of a music piece – be it for an academic interest in emulating human perception, or for practical applications –, we can thus not directly replicate the steps taken by a human. We can, however, exploit that humans can easily annotate examples, and optimize a generic function to reproduce these annotations. In this thesis, I explore solving different music perception tasks with deep learning, a recent branch of machine learning that optimizes functions of many stacked nonlinear operations – referred to as deep neural networks – and promises to obtain better results or require less domain knowledge than more traditional techniques. In particular, I employ ...

In the audio research field, the majority of machine learning systems focus on recognizing a limited number of sound events. However, when a machine interacts with real data, it must be able to handle much more varied and complex situations. To tackle this problem, annotators use natural language, which allows any sound information to be summarized. Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) was introduced recently to develop systems capable of automatically producing a description of any type of sound in text form. This task concerns all kinds of sound events such as environmental, urban, domestic sounds, sound effects, music or speech. This type of system could be used by people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and could improve the indexing of large audio databases. In the first part of this thesis, we present the state of the art of the ...

Recent years have witnessed a significant interest in interpretable machine learning (IML) research that develops techniques to analyse machine learning (ML) models. Understanding ML models is essential to gain trust in their predictions and to improve datasets, model architectures and training techniques. The majority of effort in IML research has been in analysing models that classify images or structured data and comparatively less work exists that analyses models for other domains. This research focuses on developing novel IML methods and on extending existing methods to understand machine listening models that analyse audio. In particular, this thesis reports the results of three studies that apply three different IML methods to analyse five singing voice detection (SVD) models that predict singing voice activity in musical audio excerpts. The first study introduces SoundLIME (SLIME), a method to generate temporal, spectral or time-frequency explanations ...

Single-channel source separation for radio-frequency (RF) systems is a challenging problem relevant to key applications, including wireless communications, radar, and spectrum monitoring. This thesis addresses the challenge by focusing on data-driven approaches for source separation, leveraging datasets of sample realizations when source models are not explicitly provided. To this end, deep learning techniques are employed as function approximations for source separation, with models trained using available data. Two problem abstractions are studied as benchmarks for our proposed deep-learning approaches. Through a simplified problem involving Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), we reveal the limitations of existing deep learning solutions and suggest modifications that account for the signal modality for improved performance. Further, we study the impact of time shifts on the formulation of an optimal estimator for cyclostationary Gaussian time series, serving as a performance lower bound for evaluating data-driven methods. ...

It takes more time to think of a silent scene, action or event than finding one that emanates sound. Not only speaking or playing music but almost everything that happens is accompanied with or results in one or more sounds mixed together. This makes acoustic event detection (AED) one of the most researched topics in audio signal processing nowadays and it will probably not see a decline anywhere in the near future. This is due to the thirst for understanding and digitally abstracting more and more events in life via the enormous amount of recorded audio through thousands of applications in our daily routine. But it is also a result of two intrinsic properties of audio: it doesn’t need a direct sight to be perceived and is less intrusive to record when compared to image or video. Many applications such ...

Automatic music transcription is the process of converting an audio recording into a symbolic representation using musical notation. It has numerous applications in music information retrieval, computational musicology, and the creation of interactive systems. Even for expert musicians, transcribing polyphonic pieces of music is not a trivial task, and while the problem of automatic pitch estimation for monophonic signals is considered to be solved, the creation of an automated system able to transcribe polyphonic music without setting restrictions on the degree of polyphony and the instrument type still remains open. In this thesis, research on automatic transcription is performed by explicitly incorporating information on the temporal evolution of sounds. First efforts address the problem by focusing on signal processing techniques and by proposing audio features utilising temporal characteristics. Techniques for note onset and offset detection are also utilised for improving ...

This thesis addresses the development of a system for pitch-informed solo and accompaniment separation capable of separating main instruments from music accompaniment regardless of the musical genre of the track, or type of music accompaniment. For the solo instrument, only pitched monophonic instruments were considered in a single-channel scenario where no panning or spatial location information is available. In the proposed method, pitch information is used as an initial stage of a sinusoidal modeling approach that attempts to estimate the spectral information of the solo instrument from a given audio mixture. Instead of estimating the solo instrument on a frame by frame basis, the proposed method gathers information of tone objects to perform separation. Tone-based processing allowed the inclusion of novel processing stages for attack re nement, transient interference reduction, common amplitude modulation (CAM) of tone objects, and for better ...

Music is built from sound, ultimately resulting from an elaborate interaction between the sound-generating properties of physical objects (i.e. music instruments) and the sound perception abilities of the human auditory system. Humans, even without any kind of formal music training, are typically able to ex- tract, almost unconsciously, a great amount of relevant information from a musical signal. Features such as the beat of a musical piece, the main melody of a complex musical ar- rangement, the sound sources and events occurring in a complex musical mixture, the song structure (e.g. verse, chorus, bridge) and the musical genre of a piece, are just some examples of the level of knowledge that a naive listener is commonly able to extract just from listening to a musical piece. In order to do so, the human auditory system uses a variety of cues ...

Recently, significant advances in the field of automated face recognition have been achieved using computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning methodologies. However, despite claims of super-human performance of face recognition algorithms on select key benchmark tasks, there remain several open problems that preclude the general replacement of human face recognition work with automated systems. State-of-the-art automated face recognition systems based on deep learning methods are able to achieve high accuracy when the face images they are tasked with recognizing subjects from are of sufficiently high quality. However, low image resolution remains one of the principal obstacles to face recognition systems, and their performance in the low-resolution regime is decidedly below human capabilities. In this PhD thesis, we present a systematic study of modern automated face recognition systems in the presence of image degradation in various forms. Based on our ...

Everyday sounds in real-world environments are a powerful source of information by which humans can interact with their environments. Humans can infer what is happening around them by listening to everyday sounds. At the same time, it is a challenging task for a computer algorithm in a smart device to automatically recognise, understand, and interpret everyday sounds. Sound event detection (SED) is the process of transcribing an audio recording into sound event tags with onset and offset time values. This involves classification and segmentation of sound events in the given audio recording. SED has numerous applications in everyday life which include security and surveillance, automation, healthcare monitoring, multimedia information retrieval, and assisted living technologies. SED is to everyday sounds what automatic speech recognition (ASR) is to speech and automatic music transcription (AMT) is to music. The fundamental questions in designing ...

The increasing use of technological devices and biometric recognition systems in people daily lives has motivated a great deal of research interest in the development of effective and robust systems. However, there are still some challenges to be solved in these systems when Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are employed. For this reason, this thesis proposes different approaches to address these issues. First of all, we have analyzed the effect of introducing the most widespread DNN architectures to develop systems for face and text-dependent speaker verification tasks. In this analysis, we observed that state-of-the-art DNNs established for many tasks, including face verification, did not perform efficiently for text-dependent speaker verification. Therefore, we have conducted a study to find the cause of this poor performance and we have noted that under certain circumstances this problem is due to the use of a ...

A Cochlear Implant (CI) is a medical device that enables profoundly hearing impaired people to perceive sounds by electrically stimulating the auditory nerve using an electrode array implanted in the cochlea. The focus of most research on signal processing for CIs has been on strategies to improve speech understanding in quiet and in background noise, since the main aim for implanting a CI was (and still is) to restore the ability to communicate. Most CI users perform quite well in terms of speech understanding. On the other hand, music perception and appreciation are generally very poor. The main goal of this PhD project was to investigate and to improve the poor music enjoyment in CI users. An initial experiment with multi-track recordings was carried out to examine the music mixing preferences for different instruments in polyphonic or complex music. In ...

In recent years, a huge body of data generated by various applications in domains like social networks and healthcare have paved the way for the development of high performance models. Deep learning has transformed the field of data analysis by dramatically improving the state of the art in various classification and prediction tasks. Combined with advancements in electromyography it has given rise to new hand gesture recognition applications, such as human computer interfaces, sign language recognition, robotics control and rehabilitation games. The purpose of this thesis is to develop novel methods for electromyography signal analysis based on deep learning for the problem of hand gesture recognition. Specifically, we focus on methods for data preparation and developing accurate models even when few data are available. Electromyography signals are in general one-dimensional time-series with a rich frequency content. Various feature sets have ...