Audio separation and classification of Indian classical instruments.

Audio classification and source separation are two important components in the music industry and for audio engineering as well. The Indian classical music industry is filled with a lot of similar-sounding instruments. The application of these in the field of music composition, audio signal processing and voice recognition can be a huge boon for the music industry. This research paper proposes an improvised method for audio source separation followed by a novel method for classification of the separated sources using a unique as well as novel dataset consisting of classical Indian musical instruments. The method entails decoupling the conglomerate of audio signals and categorising the resulting sources according to their unique traits using Indian Musical Instrument Classification models, CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) and SVM (Support Vector Machine) models. The proposed novel dataset Indian Musical Instrument Dataset(IMID) is an important contribution to the area because there are not any unique organised datasets for classical Indian instruments. The IMIDataset includes ten Indian instruments — Flute, Veena, Sitar, Sarod, Tabla, Violin, Guitar, Piano, Bass and Drums. To evaluate and compare the efficacy of the proposed model, comparison was made with the different datasets based on their accuracy and loss metrics. Link to the dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]