This week marked the end of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program for 2021, which saw over 1200 students work on over 200 open source projects. This year, 2 students joined us at Audacity, and we are happy to report that both completed their projects successfully! The projects were as follows:

Source Separation

Hugo Flores Garcia, mentored by Dmitry Vedenko, implemented a deep learning AI tool that, given an appropriately trained model, is able to take an audio track with multiple sound sources (e.g. a combined “singer + piano” track) and splits it into multiple tracks, with one track for each source (i.e. a “singer” track and a “piano” track). This opens up a whole variety of interesting use cases, including karaoke and background noise removal. You can learn more about the Source Separation project in Hugo’s blog.

Spectral Editing

Edward Hui, mentored by Paul Licameli, implemented the ability to edit audio tracks by drawing on the spectogram rather than the waveform as is usually the case in Audacity. He also implemented smart selection tools to automatically select regions of contiguous “colour” on the spectogram, and to select overtones (harmonics) in addition to the fundamental frequency. Spectral editing is useful for removing unwanted sounds and background noises without distorting the main part of the audio signal. You can learn more about the Spectral Editing project in Edward’s blog.

Next steps

We will continue to work with the students over the coming weeks to make the final touches necessary to get their code merged into the program, at which point it will become available in GitHub Actions builds of the master branch and a subsequent stable release of Audacity.