Instrumentals/songs separation for background music removal

Abstract

The music industry has come a long way since its inception. Music producers have also adhered to modern technology to infuse life into their creations. Systems capable of separating sounds based on sources especially vocals from songs have always been a necessity which has gained attention from researchers as well. The challenge of vocal separation elevates even more in the case of the multi-instrument environment. It is essential for a system to be first able to detect that whether a piece of music contains vocals or not prior to attempting source separation. In this paper, such a system is proposed being tested on a database of more than 99 hours of instrumentals and songs. Using the line spectral frequency-based features, we have obtained the highest accuracy of 99.78% from among six different classifiers, viz. BayesNet, support vector machine, multi layere perceptron, liblinear, simple logistic and decision table.