Title:  Development of Objective Measures for Perceptual Evaluation of Singing Voice Separation

Committee: 

Dr. Moore, LerchAdvisor       

Dr. Bhatti, Chair

Dr. Clements

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to improve the current state of the art for the perceptual evaluation of separation of the singing voice from a mixed audio signal which contains overlapping vocal and instrumental sources, through the development of new objective measures. The results obtained from a listening test to evaluate the extracted vocals in terms of isolation, intelligibility and overall quality depicted that the subjective judgment of the listeners and the assessment through state of the art objective measures did not compare very well. Through this proposal, an attempt is being made to fill in this gap between perceptual and objective assessments when it comes to Singing Voice Separation (SVS).  The proposal discusses two new sets of features, each of which has been designed for the purpose of developing new objective measures to assess the isolation as well as intelligibility of the extracted vocals.  Through comparisons with the results of the listening test, it has been demonstrated that there should be an increase in accuracy of the proposed measures as compared to the current measures. As an added advantage, the proposed features have also been designed such that they don not require the use of unmixed vocal and instrumental audio for performing the evaluation, which is not the case for existing evaluation techniques.