SiTraNo: A MATLAB App for Sines-Transients-Noise Decomposition of Audio Signals

Abstract

Decomposition of sounds into their sinusoidal, transient, and noise components is an active research topic and a widely-used tool in audio processing. Multiple solutions have been proposed in recent years, using time–frequency representations to identify either horizontal and vertical structures or orientations and anisotropy in the spectrogram of the sound. In this paper, we present SiTraNo: an easy-to-use MATLAB application with a graphic user interface for audio decomposition that enables visualization and access to the sinusoidal, transient, and noise classes, individually. This application allows the user to choose between different well-known separation methods to analyze an input sound file, to instantaneously control and remix its spectral components, and to visually check the quality of the separation, before producing the desired output file. The visualization of common artifacts, such as birdies and dropouts, is demonstrated. This application promotes experimenting with the sound decomposition process by observing the effect of variations for each spectral component on the original soundand by comparing different methods against each other, evaluating the separation quality both audibly and visually. SiTraNo and its source code are available on a companion website and repository.