56,358 research outputs found
PerformanceNet: Score-to-Audio Music Generation with Multi-Band Convolutional Residual Network
Music creation is typically composed of two parts: composing the musical
score, and then performing the score with instruments to make sounds. While
recent work has made much progress in automatic music generation in the
symbolic domain, few attempts have been made to build an AI model that can
render realistic music audio from musical scores. Directly synthesizing audio
with sound sample libraries often leads to mechanical and deadpan results,
since musical scores do not contain performance-level information, such as
subtle changes in timing and dynamics. Moreover, while the task may sound like
a text-to-speech synthesis problem, there are fundamental differences since
music audio has rich polyphonic sounds. To build such an AI performer, we
propose in this paper a deep convolutional model that learns in an end-to-end
manner the score-to-audio mapping between a symbolic representation of music
called the piano rolls and an audio representation of music called the
spectrograms. The model consists of two subnets: the ContourNet, which uses a
U-Net structure to learn the correspondence between piano rolls and
spectrograms and to give an initial result; and the TextureNet, which further
uses a multi-band residual network to refine the result by adding the spectral
texture of overtones and timbre. We train the model to generate music clips of
the violin, cello, and flute, with a dataset of moderate size. We also present
the result of a user study that shows our model achieves higher mean opinion
score (MOS) in naturalness and emotional expressivity than a WaveNet-based
model and two commercial sound libraries. We open our source code at
https://github.com/bwang514/PerformanceNetComment: 8 pages, 6 figures, AAAI 2019 camera-ready versio
The Perception of Globally Coherent Motion
How do human observers perceive a coherent pattern of motion from a disparate set of local motion measures? Our research has examined how ambiguous motion signals along straight contours are spatially integrated to obtain a globally coherent perception of motion. Observers viewed displays containing a large number of apertures, with each aperture containing one or more contours whose orientations and velocities could be independently specified. The total pattern of the contour trajectories across the individual apertures was manipulated to produce globally coherent motions, such as rotations, expansions, or translations. For displays containing only straight contours extending to the circumferences of the apertures, observers' reports of global motion direction were biased whenever the sampling of contour orientations was asymmetric relative to the direction of motion. Performance was improved by the presence of identifiable features, such as line ends or crossings, whose trajectories could be tracked over time. The reports of our observers were consistent with a pooling process involving a vector average of measures of the component of velocity normal to contour orientation, rather than with the predictions of the intersection-of-constraints analysis in velocity space.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (90-0175, 89-0016); National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (BNS-8908426
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