Yes it should work fine for real-world microphone recordings, as long as they were recorded independently and mixed without any delay. Mixing them like this is not realistic, though. In real life, if you are recording 2 sources with 2 microphones at the same time, there will be slight delay differences between the microphones, which ICA does not handle as well.

Do you think it should work on real-world recording with one microphone for each channel?

So the left channel of the audio file now contains the signal from mic 1 and the right channel from mic 2.

I want to ask how should I prepare the file so that “Mix them together to a stereo track, with both sounds mixed into both channels, but with each panned a little differently”?

Thanks.

Yes, you could do this the way humans do it. All you’d have to do is write software to simulate a human brain. I’d be very interested in getting a copy of this, if you do it.

Its definitely possible to do this with just one signal, but maybe ICA is not what I’m looking for. I would suppose it would work in the same way your brain separates out a conversation from a bunch of people talking in the same room (granted you have two ears to sample from but I’m pretty sure you would still have the ability if you were deaf in one ear).

Anyway, the thing I’m wondering is why you need N channels to produce N separated signals. Why can’t ICA just work on one signal and separate out the components? Seems a bit roundabout to have to copy a second channel and then pan it.

I want to build an app that takes in a song and separates out three signals (vocals, melody, and percussion). It would be very useful to DJs because pretty much no such software exists currently.