Peter Grosche

Content-Based Methods for Knowledge Discovery in Music

This chapter presents several computational approaches aimed at supporting knowledge discovery in music. Our work combines data mining, signal processing and data visualization techniques for the automatic analysis of digital music collections, with a focus on retrieving and understanding musical structure.

Dialogue enhancement of stereo sound

Studies show that many people have difficulties in understanding dialogue in movies when watching TV, especially hard-of-hearing listeners or in adverse listening environments. In order to overcome this problem, we propose an efficient methodology to enhance the speech component of a stereo signal. The method is designed with low computational complexity in mind, and consists of first extracting a center channel from the stereo signal. Novel methods for speech enhancement and voice activity detection are proposed which exploit the stereo information. A speech enhancement filter is estimated based on the relationship between the extracted center channel and all other channels. Subjective and objective evaluations show that this method can successfully enhance intelligibility of the dialogue without affecting the overall sound quality negatively.