Beyond Music: 5 More Fields Stem Separation is Used in

What is the purpose of splitting audio recordings into vocal and instrumental tracks? Without a doubt, the main reason is the making of song covers, karaoke versions, mashups, mixes, and the like. It's the first thing that comes to mind in association with the vocal and accompaniment isolation, and it's exactly what you see in the use case list of nearly every audio splitting service.

And yet, the applicability of separated stems extends far beyond music creation. Professional musicians and music enthusiasts are not the only ones benefiting from the song splitting tools like LALAL.AI. The amount of different tasks they could aid is countless, you are only limited by your imagination. Below is the list of the 5 most popular activities the stem separation is used for besides songs making.

#1. Movies Transcription & Translation

Few people know, but a number of song splitters support the possibility to upload and process not only audio but video files as well. An entire movie can be fed to one of such stem splitting services and the output will be two tracks - one with human speech, the other with background sounds and music. But why is this necessary in the film industry?

Firstly, extracting only speech helps to remove unnecessary sounds that can be distracting or even interfering with decoding for transcribing speech from movies and cartoons. It’s essential for subtitling and localizing movies into/from foreign languages.

Secondly, isolating only the background sounds and music helps drown out the speech of the original monologues and dialogs to put the dubbing track. In this way, the speech of the actor from the movie and the speech of the voice actor from the translation do not merge into an unintelligible mess of sounds.

Thirdly, filmmakers use separated tracks with voice and background sounds to create ripomatics - collages of audio and video clips assembled from various sources to present as a pitch trailer for a future motion picture, as well as for their own inspiration for future projects.

#2. Video Blogging

When it comes to video content creation, music is often pushed aside and treated as an afterthought. In reality, it’s one of the most important production steps. Successful filmmakers and vloggers know the power of music and how it can amplify the visuals, add more emotional impact, set the mood, and flash on the right moments in their video content.

You can’t just open a music library, blindly pick a tune, slap it onto your video clip, and call it a day -  at least not in case you expect decent results. The intent is crucial when picking and implementing a backing audio track. Lots of royalty-free tunes are offered by specialized services and even YouTube itself. Alas, more often than not these instrumentals sound generic and cheap, and those that do not, are usually already overused by thousands of other video content creators.

So where do vloggers find good music for their backing tracks? Listening all the way through huge online background music banks is extremely time-consuming. Instead, many creators make their own instrumentals out of songs by removing the vocal parts. Extracted accompaniment tracks are then either added to the video unchanged or sometimes mixed, chopped, and modified in other ways before the upload.

#3. Video Marketing

Social media was never the same after the short video format came on the scene. Moving visuals grab the attention of the user scrolling through the feed with a significantly tighter grip than any photo or text post. Video, even if short, is able to contain and present a whole lot of information.

Being able to stand out from all the other online noise and provide as many valuable details as possible, all in an easily digestible format - that’s exactly what brands and influencers need to establish a presence and continually expand on social media.

You could say that brands using video in their marketing strategy function as part-time video bloggers. They also think through the plan, shoot the material, edit it, and find the right music backdrop. Brands face equally similar problems when searching for a suitable audio track, and often solve them in the same way - they isolate instrumental parts from songs and use them as background audio.

#4. Live Events

It's hard to imagine a presentation, party, fashion show or any other event where only the voices of the people present and the noise of the operating machinery can be heard. Audio background at live events plays no less of a role than it does in movies or videos, also controlling attention, setting and changing the tone and mood. Although live events are currently complicated by the pandemic, that doesn't mean that having fun around people is off the table for good.

Already we can see how various organizations and businesses are adapting and using the difficult conditions of the pandemic to their own and others' advantage. They are organizing exclusive events for a limited number of vaccinated persons, as well as developing local trade, entertainment, and art scenes while the transit to other countries is limited.

#5. Lessons & Practice

In the world of music, the use of backing tracks is a controversial topic. Although many musicians advocate it, the practice remains taboo and is condemned by performers and listeners alike. However, there are areas directly related to music in which the backing tracks use is absolutely dignified - lessons, rehearsals, as well as dance practice, vocal training, and playing various musical instruments.

Teachers and students of music and dance always utilize instrumental versions of songs, individual instruments from the accompaniment, and a cappella in their practice. There are, of course, dedicated music banks of backing tracks but you may not find the right track within their libraries.

Plus, you can’t extract vocals and individual instruments from a recording yourself without specialized knowledge and proper tools. The easiest and least resource-consuming way to find such tracks is to use online vocal removers, instrumental isolators, and other services of the kind.

If you want to get separate tracks from any audio or video file, you can do it for free with our service LALAL.AI. Two powerful neural networks split movies and songs into their components that you can then use for the purposes described in this article and many other tasks.