Resource-constrained stereo singing voice cancellation

We study the problem of stereo singing voice cancellation, a subtask of music source separation, whose goal is to estimate an instrumental background from a stereo mix. We explore how to achieve performance similar to large state-of-the-art source separation networks starting from a small, efficient model for real-time speech separation. Such a model is useful when memory and compute are limited and singing voice processing has to run with limited look-ahead. In practice, this is realised by adapting an existing mono model to handle stereo input. Improvements in quality are obtained by tuning model parameters and expanding the training set. Moreover, we highlight the benefits a stereo model brings by introducing a new metric which detects attenuation inconsistencies between channels. Our approach is evaluated using objective offline metrics and a large-scale MUSHRA trial, confirming the effectiveness of our techniques in stringent listening tests.

Lyric document embeddings for music tagging

We present an empirical study on embedding the lyrics of a song into a fixed-dimensional feature for the purpose of music tagging. Five methods of computing token-level and four methods of computing document-level representations are trained on an industrial-scale dataset of tens of millions of songs. We compare simple averaging of pretrained embeddings to modern recurrent and attention-based neural architectures. Evaluating on a wide range of tagging tasks such as genre classification, explicit content identification and era detection, we find that averaging word embeddings outperform more complex architectures in many downstream metrics.