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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

I hope we keep making progress in isolating tracks in music. I love listening to stems of my favorite songs, I find all sorts of neat parts I missed out on. Listening to isolated harmonies is cool too.

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From the papers I've read, the stem separation models all seem to train off what seems like a fairly small dataset that doesn't have great instrument representation.

I wonder if you could assemble a big corpus of individual solo instruments, then permute a cacophonous mix of them. IIRC the main training dataset is comprised of a limited number of real songs. But I think a model trained on real songs might struggle with more "out there" harmonies and mixes.

The problem of track isolation is sometimes underconstrained, and so any AI system that does this will probably invent "neat parts" for us to hear that weren't necessarily in the original recording. It feels like using super-resolution models to notice details about your great-grandma's wedding dress.

It shall also allow to make re-recordings in higher quality of stuff that are impossible to find in good quality. Like that cover that that band played only once at that obscure concert and that was recorded on an old tape. Or many very old reggae songs: although many from Jamaica/Kingston had great recordings (there was know-how and great recording studios there) there's also a shitload of old reggae songs that are just barely listenable to because the recording is so poor (and, no, it's not an artistic choice by the artist: it's just, you know, a crappy recording).

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