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arXiv · 2503.04995

Musical Source Separation of Brazilian Percussion

Abstract

Musical source separation (MSS) has recently seen a big breakthrough in separating instruments from a mixture in the context of Western music, but research on non-Western instruments is still limited due to a lack of data. In this demo, we use an existing dataset of Brazilian sama percussion to create artificial mixtures for training a U-Net model to separate the surdo drum, a traditional instrument in samba. Despite limited training data, the model effectively isolates the surdo, given the drum's repetitive patterns and its characteristic low-pitched timbre. These results suggest that MSS systems can be successfully harnessed to work in more culturally-inclusive scenarios without the need of collecting extensive amounts of data.

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BibTeXRIS

Richa Namballa, Giovana Morais, Magdalena Fuentes. 2025-03-06. Musical Source Separation of Brazilian Percussion. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04995

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