Evaluation of the Separation Algorithm Performance Employing ANNs

The objective of the presented study is to show that it is possible to effectively separate harmonic sounds from musical sound mixtures for the purpose of automatic sounds recognition, without any prior knowledge of the mixed instruments. It has also been shown that a properly trained ANN enables to reliably validate separation results of mixed musical instrument sounds, and the validation corresponds with subjective perception of the separated sounds quality. A comparison between the results obtained with the use of the ANN-based recognition, subjective evaluation of the separation performance and the energy-based evaluation is provided.