alt Hacker NewsAre you making this up? What spectral analysis libraries or tools?
String instruments create similar harmonic series to horns, winds, and voice (because everything is a string in some dimension) and the major differences are in the spectral envelope, something that STFT tools are just ok at approximating because of the time/frequency tradeoff (aka: the uncertainty principle).
This is a very hard problem "in theory" to me, and I'm just above casually versed in it.
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If you look at the actual harmonics of a string and of horn, you will see how wrong you are. There is a reason why they sound different to the ear.
It’s because of this that you can have a relatively inexpensive synthesizer (not sample or PCM based) that does a crude job of mimicking these different instruments by just changing the harmonics.
I might misremember, but iZotope RX and Melodyne were pretty useful in this regard.
He's not making it up and there's no reason for that tone. Strings are more straightforward to isolate compared to vocals/horns/etc because they produce a near-perfect harmonic series in parallel lines in a spectrogram. The time/frequency tradeoff exists, but it's less of a problem for strings because of their slow attack.
You can look up HPSS and python libraries like Essentia and Librosa.