Parameter estimation for harmonic and inharmonic models by using timbre feature distributions

We describe an improved way of estimating parameters for an integrated weighted-mixture model consisting of both harmonic and inharmonic tone models. Our final goal is to build an instrument equalizer (music remixer) that enables a user to change the volume of parts of polyphonic sound mixtures. To realize the instrument equalizer, musical signals must be separated into each musical instrument part. We have developed a score-informed sound source separation method using the integrated model. A remaining but critical problem is to find a way to deal with timbre varieties caused by various performance styles and instrument bodies because our method used template sounds to represent their timbre. Template sounds are generated from a MIDI tone generator based on an aligned score. Difference of instrument bodies between mixed signals and template sounds causes timbre difference and decreases separation performance. To solve this problem, we train probabilistic distributions of timbre features using various sounds to reduce template dependency. By adding a new constraint of maximizing the likelihood of timbre features extracted from each tone model, we can estimate model parameters that express the timbre more accurately. Experimental results show that separation performance improved from 4.89 to 8.48 dB.