Transcription and separation of drum signals from polyphonic music

The purpose of this article is to present new advances in music transcription and source separation with a focus on drum signals. A complete drum transcription system is described, which combines information from the original music signal and a drum track enhanced version obtained by source separation. In addition to efficient fusion strategies to take into account these two complementary sources of information, the transcription system integrates a large set of features, optimally selected by feature selection. Concurrently, the problem of drum track extraction from polyphonic music is tackled both by proposing a novel approach based on harmonic/noise decomposition and time/frequency masking and by improving an existing Wiener filtering-based separation method. The separation and transcription techniques presented are thoroughly evaluated on a large public database of music signals. A transcription accuracy between 64.5% and 80.3% is obtained, depending on the drum instrument, for well-balanced mixes, and the efficiency of our drum separation algorithms is illustrated in a comprehensive benchmark.