Motion informed audio source separation

Abstract

In this paper we tackle the problem of single channel audio source separation driven by descriptors of the sounding object's motion. As opposed to previous approaches, motion is included as a soft-coupling constraint within the nonnegative matrix factorization framework. The proposed method is applied to a multimodal dataset of instruments in string quartet performance recordings where bow motion information is used for separation of string instruments. We show that the approach offers better source separation result than an audio-based baseline and the state-of-the-art multimodal-based approaches on these very challenging music mixtures.