Sorry I didn't see your responses until now. Indeed, there are many ways to slice the specific problem. I was specifically responding to the parent's statement:

> It would be a game changer if someone were to come up with a novel method of decomposing audio into discrete components

It's something that has been generally addressed and ~works. It will obviously depend on the specifics of the application, and yes if you can constrain the problem space further you ought to do better!