Guitar String Separation Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization and Factor Deconvolution

Guitar string separation is a novel and complicated task. Guitar notes are not pure steady-state signals, hence, we hypothesize that neither Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) nor Non-Negative Matrix Factor Deconvolution (NMFD) are optimal for separating them. Therefore, we separate steady-state and transient parts using Harmonic-Percussive Separation (HPS) as a preprocessing step. Then, we use NMF for factorizing the harmonic part and NMFD for deconvolving the percussive part. We make use of a hexaphonic guitar dataset which allows for objective evaluation. In addition, we compare several types of time-frequency mask and introduce an intuitive way to combine a binary mask with a ratio mask. We show that the HPS mask type has an effect on source estimation. Our proposed method achieved results comparable to NMF without HPS. Finally, we show that the optimal mask at the final separation stage depends on the estimation algorithm.