Low-latency Bass Separation using Harmonic-Percussion Decomposition

Many recent approaches to musical source separation rely on model-based inference methods that take into account the signal’s harmonic structure. To address the particular case of low-latency bass separation, we propose a method that combines harmonic decomposition using a Tikhonov regularization-based algorithm, with the peak contrast analysis of the pitch likelihood function. Our experiment compares the separation performance of this method to a naive low-pass filter, a state-of-the-art NMF-based method and a near-optimal binary mask. The proposed low-latency method achieves results similar to the NMF-based high-latency approach at a lower computational cost. Therefore the method is valid for real-time implementations.