High-resolution sinusoidal analysis for resolving harmonic collisions in music audio signal processing
Andreas F. Ehmann · 2011
Many music signals can largely be considered an additive combination of multiple sources, such as musical instruments or voice. If the musical sources are pitched instruments, the spectra they produce are predominantly har-monic, and are thus well suited to an additive sinusoidal model. However, due to resolution limits inherent in time-frequency analyses, when the har-monics of multiple sources occupy equivalent time-frequency regions, their individual properties are additively combined in the time-frequency repre-sentation of the mixed signal. Any such time-frequency point in a mixture where multiple harmonics overlap produces a single observation from which the contributions owed to each of the individual harmonics cannot be trivially deduced. These overlaps are referred to as overlapping partials or harmonic collisions. If one wishes to infer some information about individual sources in music mixtures, the information carried in regions where collided harmonics exist becomes unreliable due to interference from other sources. This inter-