See and listen: Score-informed association of sound tracks to players in chamber music performance videos

Abstract

Both audio and visual aspects of a musical performance, especially their association, are important for expressing players' ideas and for engaging the audience. In this paper, we present a framework for combining audio and video analyses of multi-instrument chamber music performances to associate players in the video to the individual separated instrument sources from the audio, in a score-informed fashion. The instrument sources are first separated using a score-informed source separation techniques. The individual sources are then associated with different players in the video by correlating the onset instants of their aligned score tracks with the players' motion detected using optical flow. Experiments on 19 musical pieces with varying polyphony show that the proposed method obtains the correct association for 17 pieces, and an accuracy of 89.2% of the association of all individual tracks. The approach enables novel music enjoyment experiences by allowing users to target an audio source by clicking on the player in the video to separate/enhance it.