  A class of methods based on multichannel linear prediction (MCLP) can achieve
effective blind dereverberation of a source, when the source is observed with a
microphone array. We propose an inventive use of MCLP as a pre-processing step
for blind source separation with a microphone array. We show theoretically
that, under certain assumptions, such pre-processing reduces the original blind
reverberant source separation problem to a non-reverberant one, which in turn
can be effectively tackled using existing methods. We demonstrate our claims
using real recordings obtained with an eight-microphone circular array in
reverberant environments.
