Music Source Separation in the Waveform Domain
Authors: Alexandre Defossez, Nicolas Usunier, Leon Bottou, Francis Bach
Keywords: source separation, audio synthesis, deep learning
TL;DR: We match the performance of spectrogram based model with a model trained end-to-end in the waveform domain
Abstract: Source separation for music is the task of isolating contributions, or stems, from different instruments recorded individually and arranged together to form a song.Such components include voice, bass, drums and any other accompaniments. While end-to-end models that directly generate the waveform are state-of-the-art in many audio synthesis problems, the best multi-instrument source separation models generate masks on the magnitude spectrum and achieve performances far above current end-to-end, waveform-to-waveform models. We present an in-depth analysis of a new architecture, which we will refer to as Demucs, based on a (transposed) convolutional autoencoder, with a bidirectional LSTM at the bottleneck layer and skip-connections as in U-Networks (Ronneberger et al., 2015). Compared to the state-of-the-art waveform-to-waveform model, Wave-U-Net (Stoller et al., 2018), the main features of our approach in addition of the bi-LSTM are the use of trans-posed convolution layers instead of upsampling-convolution blocks, the use of gated linear units, exponentially growing the number of channels with depth and a new careful initialization of the weights.  Results on the MusDB dataset show that our architecture achieves a signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) nearly 2.2 points higher than the best waveform-to-waveform competitor (from 3.2 to 5.4 SDR). This makes our model match the state-of-the-art performances on this dataset, bridging the performance gap between models that operate on the spectrogram and end-to-end approaches.