The music demixing machine: toward real-time remixing of classical music

Classical music, unlike popular music, is usually recorded live with close microphone techniques. For this reason, isolated tracks are not available to create the final mixture/stream, and so the mixing process requires greater effort. Source separation methods are a potential solution to this problem. However, current algorithms are not fast enough to yield real-time separation in professional setups with dozens of microphones and sources. In this paper, we propose a fast approach consisting of a panning-based multichannel non-negative matrix factorization model to separate classical music. We tested the system on real professional recordings, where we were able to reach real-time with very low latency and promising quality.