Gramophone Noise Detection and Reconstruction Using Time Delay Artificial Neural Networks

Gramophone records were the main recording medium for more than seven decades and regained widespread popularity over the past several years. Being an analog storage medium, gramophone records are subject to distortions caused by scratches, dust particles, degradation, and other means of improper handling. The observed noise often leads to an unpleasant listening experience and requires a filtering process to remove the unwanted disruptions and improve the audio quality. This paper proposes a novel approach that employs various feed forward time delay artificial neural networks to detect and reconstruct noise in musical sound waves. A set of 800 songs from eight different genres were used to validate the performance of the neural networks. The performance was analyzed according to the outlier detection and interpolation accuracy, the computational time and the tradeoff between the accuracy and the time. The empirical results of both detection and reconstruction neural networks were compared to a number of other algorithms, including various statistical measurements, duplication approaches, trigonometric processes, polynomials, and time series models. It was found that the neural networks’ outlier detection accuracy was slightly lower than some of the other noise identification algorithms, but achieved a more efficient tradeoff by detecting most of the noise in real time. The reconstruction process favored neural networks with an increase in the interpolation accuracy compared to other widely used time series models. It was also found that certain genres such as classical, country, and jazz music were interpolated more accurately. Volatile signals, such as electronic, metal, and pop music were more challenging to reconstruct and were substantially better interpolated using neural networks than the other examined algorithms.