Separation of musical instrument timbre using performance information and real-time harmonic/inharmonic component filtering

Described here is a technique for the real-time separation of a musical instrument timbre from a multitimbre sound source. The separated timbre may be a timbral component of a single musical instrument timbre (e.g., the breath noise from a wind instrument) or an instrument timbre from a multi-instrument sound source. The separation is accomplished by first using performance information, such as pitch tracking or score alignment, to estimate a fundamental frequency for the source of the timbre to be separated. Real-time analysis/resynthesis filtering of the sinusoidal components based on their harmonic relationship to the estimated fundamental frequency is then employed to extract the desired timbre.