Re: separating voices and music in movie scenes

[Christian Kaernbach <auditorymail@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Pawel and Eero,

Thank you very much for your responses. The "physical" approach 
(remixing of channels) is one that I did not consider up to now, and 
which might with some movies really help. We will probably use only very 
recent movies, as we have found that the degree of familiarity is 
important for the elicitation of strong emotion. (Believe it or not: 
many students would not know Casablanca.) The movies would be in Dolby.

What I really thought was that by now auditory scene analysis (ASA) 
would be advanced far enough to solve this problem. It is simpler than 
segregating the voice from songs, because it would normally deal with 
spoken speech (as opposed to sung speech) that is overlayed with 
instrumental music. I have listened years ago to some demonstration of 
somebody who presented the result of a computational ASA approach, and 
it was (as a demo) quite convincing. Unluckily I don't remember the 
details, nor the name. I have no idea whether such algorithms are by now 
mature enough to solve such a task.

Best,
Christian Kaernbach