1. A method for distinguishing one or more components of a signal, comprising steps: acquiring the signal from an environment with a sensor; processing the signal to estimate a set of analysis features, wherein each analysis feature defines an element of the signal, and has feature values that represent parts of the signal; processing the signal to estimate input features of the signal; processing the input features using a deep neural network (DNN) to assign an associative descriptor to each element of the signal, wherein a degree of similarity between the associative descriptors of different elements is related to a degree to which the parts of the signal represented by the elements belong to a single component of the signal; processing the similarities between associative descriptors to estimate correspondences between the elements of the signal and one or more components in the signal; and processing the signal using the correspondences to distinguish the parts of the one or more components of the signal, wherein the steps are performed in a processor.