Feasibility of Single Channel Speaker Separation Based on Modulation Frequency Analysis

We explore the use of the modulation frequency domain for single channel speaker separation. We discuss features of the modulation spectrogram of speech signals that suggest that multiple speakers are highly separable in this space. In a preliminary experiment, we separate a target speaker from an interfering speaker by manually masking out modulation spectral features of the interferer. We extend this experiment into a new automatic speaker separation algorithm, and show that it achieves an acceptable level of separation. The new algorithm only needs a rough estimate of the target speaker's pitch range.