Handbook of Blind Source Separation

Chapter 19

Audio applications

E. Vincent and Y. Deville

Acoustic signal processing is one of the earliest fields in which the source separation problem was studied. Indeed, most available acoustic signals are mixtures of several sources. Although good separation may currently be obtained for some simple synthetic mixtures, the separation of real-world signals requires basic competence in this field and remains difficult to achieve. It should therefore be stressed that acoustics is among the most difficult application fields of source separation under investigation.

Early acoustic source separation systems relied on fixed or adaptive beamforming, which remains in use today [12]. These systems require some prior knowledge, such as the relative positions ...