Abstract
Object-based audio has the potential to enable multime- dia content to be tailored to individual listeners and their reproduc- tion equipment. In general, object-based production assumes that the objects|the assets comprising the scene|are free of noise and inter- ference. However, there are many applications in which signal separa- tion could be useful to an object-based audio work ow, e.g., extracting individual objects from channel-based recordings or legacy content, or recording a sound scene with a single microphone array. This paper de- scribes the application and evaluation of blind source separation (BSS) for sound recording in a hybrid channel-based and object-based workflow, in which BSS-estimated objects are mixed with the original stereo recording. A subjective experiment was conducted using simultaneously spoken speech recorded with omnidirectional microphones in a rever- berant room. Listeners mixed a BSS-extracted speech object into the scene to make the quieter talker clearer, while retaining acceptable au- dio quality, compared to the raw stereo recording. Objective evaluations show that the relative short-term objective intelligibility and speech qual- ity scores increase using BSS. Further objective evaluations are used to discuss the in uence of the BSS method on the remixing scenario; the scenario shown by human listeners to be useful in object-based audio is shown to be a worse-case scenario.