Spectrogram-channels u-net: a source separation model viewing each channel as the spectrogram of each source

Abstract: Sound source separation has attracted attention from Music Information Retrieval(MIR) researchers, since it is related to many MIR tasks such as automatic lyric transcription, singer identification, and voice conversion. In this paper, we propose an intuitive spectrogram-based model for source separation by adapting U-Net. We call it Spectrogram-Channels U-Net, which means each channel of the output corresponds to the spectrogram of separated source itself. The proposed model can be used for not only singing voice separation but also multi-instrument separation by changing only the number of output channels. In addition, we propose a loss function that balances volumes between different sources. Finally, we yield performance that is state-of-the-art on both separation tasks.