# Exploiting Time-Frequency Conformers for Music Audio Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12599 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12599/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/) (2019)
- [Fr'echet Audio Distance: A Metric for Evaluating Music Enhancement Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08466/) (2018)
- [SEGAN: Speech Enhancement Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09452/) (2017)
- [DCCRN: Deep Complex Convolution Recurrent Network for Phase-Aware Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00264/) (2020)
- [Music Source Separation in the Waveform Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13254/) (2019)
- [Phase-aware Speech Enhancement with Deep Complex U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03107/) (2019)
- [ICASSP 2022 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13288/) (2022)
- [The 2018 Signal Separation Evaluation Campaign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06267/) (2018)
- [CMGAN: Conformer-Based Metric-GAN for Monaural Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11112/) (2022)
- [Real-time Denoising and Dereverberation with Tiny Recurrent U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03207/) (2021)
- [DF-Conformer: Integrated architecture of Conv-TasNet and Conformer using linear complexity self-attention for speech enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15813/) (2021)
- [Uformer: A Unet based dilated complex & real dual-path conformer network for simultaneous speech enhancement and dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06015/) (2021)
- [Music Enhancement via Image Translation and Vocoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13289/) (2022)
- [Music Separation Enhancement with Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12387/) (2022)
- [CycleGAN-based Non-parallel Speech Enhancement with an Adaptive Attention-in-attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13143/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [From Discord to Harmony: Decomposed Consonance-based Training for Improved Audio Chord Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01588/) (2025)
- [ChordSync: Conformer-Based Alignment of Chord Annotations to Music Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00674/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the proliferation of video platforms on the internet, recording musical performances by mobile devices has become commonplace. However, these recordings often suffer from degradation such as noise and reverberation, which negatively impact the listening experience. Consequently, the necessity for music audio enhancement (referred to as music enhancement from this point onward), involving the transformation of degraded audio recordings into pristine high-quality music, has surged to augment the auditory experience. To address this issue, we propose a music enhancement system based on the Conformer architecture that has demonstrated outstanding performance in speech enhancement tasks. Our approach explores the attention mechanisms of the Conformer and examines their performance to discover the best approach for the music enhancement task. Our experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-stem music enhancement. Furthermore, our system can perform general music enhancement with multi-track mixtures, which has not been examined in previous work.