Audio Source Separation: "Demixing" for Production

"Live at the Hollywood Bowl" was the only live album from The Beatles, and a hard one to listen to because of the screaming fans drowning out the music. The simple concert recording technology available in 1964 provided only a 3-track recording that was impossible to remix effectively using traditional methods. However, Abbey Road Studios recently used MATLAB^® to create a new proprietary algorithm that can separate out the individual original sources from the old recordings in order to remaster the recording and remove 95% of the background noise from the fans. In this talk, you will learn how a single engineer built a tool that exceeded any solution available on the market through community collaboration, code reuse, and the ability to quickly turn mathematical algorithms into an effective application. The complex tool they developed includes a mixture of spectral analysis, optimization, control theory, and musical modelling, and allowed them to release a new version of the album where the Fab Four can be heard live and like never before.