A neural analysis-synthesis approach to learning procedural audio models

The effective sound design of environmental sounds is crucial to demonstrating an immersive experience. Classical Procedural Audio (PA) models have been developed to give the sound designer a fast way to synthesize a specific class of environmental sounds in a physically accurate and computationally efficient manner. These models are controllable due to the choice of parameters from analyzing a class of sound. However, the resulting synthesis lacks the fidelity for the preferred immersive experience; thus, the sound designer would rather search through an extensive database for real recordings of a target sound class. This thesis proposes the Procedural audio Variational autoEncoder (ProVE), a general framework for developing a high-fidelity PA model through data-driven neural audio synthesis methods to address the lack of realism in classical PA models. The two-step procedure of training ProVE models is explained through examples of sound classes of footstep sounds and the sound of pouring water. Furthermore, the thesis demonstrates a web application where users can generate footstep sounds by defining control variables for a pretrained ProVE model to show its capacity for interactive use in sound design workflows. The increase in fidelity from ProVE models is explored through objective evaluations of audio and subjective evaluations against classical PA methods. These results show that these learned neural PA models are feasible for sound design projects. The thesis concludes with a discussion of applications and future research directions

Neural Synthesis of Footsteps Sound Effects with Generative Adversarial Networks

Footsteps are among the most ubiquitous sound effects in multimedia applications. There is substantial research into understanding the acoustic features and developing synthesis models for footstep sound effects. In this paper, we present a first attempt at adopting neural synthesis for this task. We implemented two GAN-based architectures and compared the results with real recordings as well as six traditional sound synthesis methods. Our architectures reached realism scores as high as recorded samples, showing encouraging results for the task at hand

Automatic characterization and generation of music loops and instrument samples for electronic music production

Repurposing audio material to create new music - also known as sampling - was a foundation of electronic music and is a fundamental component of this practice. Currently, large-scale databases of audio offer vast collections of audio material for users to work with. The navigation on these databases is heavily focused on hierarchical tree directories. Consequently, sound retrieval is tiresome and often identified as an undesired interruption in the creative process. We address two fundamental methods for navigating sounds: characterization and generation. Characterizing loops and one-shots in terms of instruments or instrumentation allows for organizing unstructured collections and a faster retrieval for music-making. The generation of loops and one-shot sounds enables the creation of new sounds not present in an audio collection through interpolation or modification of the existing material. To achieve this, we employ deep-learning-based data-driven methodologies for classification and generation.Repurposing audio material to create new music - also known as sampling - was a foundation of electronic music and is a fundamental component of this practice. Currently, large-scale databases of audio offer vast collections of audio material for users to work with. The navigation on these databases is heavily focused on hierarchical tree directories. Consequently, sound retrieval is tiresome and often identified as an undesired interruption in the creative process. We address two fundamental methods for navigating sounds: characterization and generation. Characterizing loops and one-shots in terms of instruments or instrumentation allows for organizing unstructured collections and a faster retrieval for music-making. The generation of loops and one-shot sounds enables the creation of new sounds not present in an audio collection through interpolation or modification of the existing material. To achieve this, we employ deep-learning-based data-driven methodologies for classification and generation

A Proposal for Foley Sound Synthesis Challenge

"Foley" refers to sound effects that are added to multimedia during post-production to enhance its perceived acoustic properties, e.g., by simulating the sounds of footsteps, ambient environmental sounds, or visible objects on the screen. While foley is traditionally produced by foley artists, there is increasing interest in automatic or machine-assisted techniques building upon recent advances in sound synthesis and generative models. To foster more participation in this growing research area, we propose a challenge for automatic foley synthesis. Through case studies on successful previous challenges in audio and machine learning, we set the goals of the proposed challenge: rigorous, unified, and efficient evaluation of different foley synthesis systems, with an overarching goal of drawing active participation from the research community. We outline the details and design considerations of a foley sound synthesis challenge, including task definition, dataset requirements, and evaluation criteria

16th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC 2019 (28–31 May 2019, Malaga, Spain)

The 16th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2019) took place in Malaga, Spain, 28-31 May 2019 and it was organized by the Application of Information and Communication Technologies Research group (ATIC) of the University of Malaga (UMA). The SMC 2019 associated Summer School took place 25-28 May 2019. The First International Day of Women in Inclusive Engineering, Sound and Music Computing Research (WiSMC 2019) took place on 28 May 2019. The SMC 2019 TOPICS OF INTEREST included a wide selection of topics related to acoustics, psychoacoustics, music, technology for music, audio analysis, musicology, sonification, music games, machine learning, serious games, immersive audio, sound synthesis, etc

Learning Beyond-pixel Mappings from Internet Videos

Recently in the Computer Vision community, there have been significant advancements in algorithms to recognize or localize visual contents for both images and videos, for instance, object recognition and detection tasks. They infer the information that is directly visible within the images or video frames (predicting what’s in the frame). While human-level visual understanding could be much more than that, because human also have insights about the information ’beyond the frame’. In other words, people are able to reasonably infer information that is not visible from the current scenes, such as predicting possible future events. We expect the computational models could own the same capabilities one day. Learning beyond-pixel mappings can be a broad concept. In this dissertation, we carefully define and formulate the problems as specific and subdivided tasks from different aspects. Under this context, what beyond-pixel mapping does is to infer information of broader spatial or temporal context, or even information from other modalities like text or sound. We first present a computational framework to learn the mappings between short event video clips and their intrinsic temporal sequence (which one usually happens first). Then we keep exploring the follow-up direction by directly predicting the future. Specifically we utilize generative models to predict depictions of objects in their future state. Next, we explore a related generation task to generate video frames of the target person with unseen poses guided by a random person. Finally, we propose a framework to learn the mappings between input video frames and it’s counterpart in sound domain. The main contribution of this dissertation lies in exploring beyond-pixel mappings from various directions to add relevant knowledge to the next-generation AI platforms.Doctor of Philosoph

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference - June 5-12, 2022 - Saint-Étienne (France). https://smc22.grame.f

Deep Learning Methods for Instrument Separation and Recognition

This thesis explores deep learning methods for timbral information processing in polyphonic music analysis. It encompasses two primary tasks: Music Source Separation (MSS) and Instrument Recognition, with focus on applying domain knowledge and utilising dense arrangements of skip-connections in the frameworks in order to reduce the number of trainable parameters and create more efficient models. Musically-motivated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures are introduced, emphasizing kernels with vertical, square, and horizontal shapes. This design choice allows for the extraction of essential harmonic and percussive features, which enhances the discrimination of different instruments. Notably, this methodology proves valuable for Harmonic-Percussive Source Separation (HPSS) and instrument recognition tasks. A significant challenge in MSS is generalising to new instrument types and music styles. To address this, a versatile framework for adversarial unsupervised domain adaptation for source separation is proposed, particularly beneficial when labeled data for specific instruments is unavailable. The curation of the Tap & Fiddle dataset is another contribution of the research, offering mixed and isolated stem recordings of traditional Scandinavian fiddle tunes, along with foot-tapping accompaniments, fostering research in source separation and metrical expression analysis within these musical styles. Since our perception of timbre is affected in different ways by transient and stationary parts of sound, the research investigates the potential of Transient Stationary-Noise Decomposition (TSND) as a preprocessing step for frame-level recognition. A method that performs TSND of spectrograms and feeds the decomposed spectrograms to a neural classifier is proposed. Furthermore, this thesis introduces a novel deep learning-based approach for pitch streaming, treating the task as a note-level instrument classification. Such an approach is modular, meaning that it can also successfully stream predicted note-events and not only labelled ground truth note-event information to corresponding instruments. Therefore, the proposed pitch streaming method enables third-party multi-pitch estimation algorithms to perform multi-instrument AMT