NBU: Neural Binaural Upmixing of Stereo Content

Philipp Grundhuber; Michael Lovedee-Turner; Emanuël Habets
DAFx-2024 - Guildford
While immersive music productions have become popular in recent years, music content produced during the last decades has been predominantly mixed for stereo. This paper presents a datadriven approach to automatic binaural upmixing of stereo music. The network architecture HDemucs, previously utilized for both source separation and binauralization, is leveraged for an endto-end approach to binaural upmixing. We employ two distinct datasets, demonstrating that while custom-designed training data enhances the accuracy of spatial positioning, the use of professionally mixed music yields superior spatialization. The trained networks show a capacity to process multiple simultaneous sources individually and add valid binaural cues, effectively positioning sources with an average azimuthal error of less than 11.3 ◦ . A listening test with binaural experts shows it outperforms digital signal processing-based approaches to binauralization of stereo content in terms of spaciousness while preserving audio quality.
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