I watched a show today where they talked about isolating certain sounds (such as a particular speaker) from the background of a noisy restaurant to allow better conversations in a busy environment. I have also seen software programs that can isolate particular instruments/vocals from a song. How does this work? I understand in a video image you can use techniques like edge detection and like to define the boundaries of an object and isolate it from the background, but this is because you have a matrix of pixels to compare. With audio, you only have a single waveform that is the combined contribution of all the sounds coming into the ear or that make up the recording. How do you split that back out into its individual components? How do you isolate particular sounds, especially speech or instruments that can span a wide range of frequencies and volumes, from the rest of the noise? I just don’t understand how you undo the summation of the individual waveforms and pull them out from everything else.
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They are isolated from the start. Music is typically recording one instrument at a time on separate recording channels. Even drum kits have individual microphones on each drum, cybal, etc that each feed their own channels. These individual channels are later mixed down into the stereo channels you are used to playing them back in.
You can not effectively isolate a single instrument from a standard commercial music recording like you would purchase from iTunes. You would need the master recording with the individual tracks, or some other type of special mix–such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band tracks–where the individual instruments were broken out separately during mixdown.
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