• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.8
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• pp.697-705
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• 2009

An unsupervised (blind) method is proposed aiming at extracting rhythmic sources from commercial polyphonic music whose number of channels is limited to one. Commercial music signals are not usually provided with more than two channels while they often contain multiple instruments including singing voice. Therefore, instead of using conventional modeling of mixing environments or statistical characteristics, we should introduce other source-specific characteristics for separating or extracting sources in the under determined environments. In this paper, we concentrate on extracting rhythmic sources from the mixture with the other harmonic sources. An extension of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), which is called nonnegative matrix partial co-factorization (NMPCF), is used to analyze multiple relationships between spectral and temporal properties in the given input matrices. Moreover, temporal repeatability of the rhythmic sound sources is implicated as a common rhythmic property among segments of an input mixture signal. The proposed method shows acceptable, but not superior separation quality to referred prior knowledge-based drum source separation systems, but it has better applicability due to its blind manner in separation, for example, when there is no prior information or the target rhythmic source is irregular.