Audio AI: isolating vocals from stereo music using Convolutional Neural Networks

Formally known as Audio Source Separation, the problem we are trying to solve here consists in recovering or reconstructing one or more source signals that, through some -linear or convolutive- process, have been mixed with other signals. The field has many practical applications including but not limited to speech denoising and enhancement, music remixing, spatial audio, remastering, etc. In the context of music production, it is sometimes referred to as unmixing or demixing. For a nice walkthrough on the first two, you can check out these tutorial mini-series from CCRMA, which I found very useful back in the day. As someone who's been working in signal & image processing for a while and prior to the'deep-learning-solves-it-all' boom, I will introduce the solution as a Feature Engineering journey and show you why, for this particular problem, an artificial neural network ends up being the best approach.