VOICE AND STREAM: PERCEPTUAL AND COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF VOICE SEPARATION.

LISTENERS ARE THOUGHT TO BE CAPABLE of perceiving multiple voices in music. This paper presents different views of what `voice' means and how the problem of voice separation can be systematically described, with a view to understanding the problem better and developing a systematic description of the cognitive task of segregating voices in music. Well-established perceptual principles of auditory streaming are examined and then tailored to the more specific problem of voice separation in timbrally undifferentiated music. Adopting a perceptual view of musical voice, a computational prototype is developed that splits a musical score (symbolic musical data) into different voices. A single `voice' may consist of one or more synchronous notes that are perceived as belonging to the same auditory stream. The proposed model is tested against a small dataset that acts as ground truth. The results support the theoretical viewpoint adopted in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]