Monaural Source Separation Using Spectral Cues
The acoustic environment poses at least two important challenges. First, animals must localise sound sources using a variety of binaural and monaural cues; and second they must separate sources into distinct auditory streams (the “cocktail party problem”). Binaural cues include intra-aural intensity and phase disparity. The primary monaural cue is the spectral filtering introduced by the head and pinnae via the head-related transfer function (HRTF), which imposes different linear filters upon sources arising at different spatial locations.