Audio style transfer

'Style transfer' among images has recently emerged as a very active research topic, fuelled by the power of convolution neural networks (CNNs), and has become fast a very popular technology in social media. This paper investigates the analogous problem in the audio domain: How to transfer the style of a reference audio signal to a target audio content? We propose a flexible framework for the task, which uses a sound texture model to extract statistics characterizing the reference audio style, followed by an optimization-based audio texture synthesis to modify the target content. In contrast to mainstream optimization-based visual transfer method, the proposed process is initialized by the target content instead of random noise and the optimized loss is only about texture, not structure. These differences proved key for audio style transfer in our experiments. In order to extract features of interest, we investigate different architectures, whether pre-trained on other tasks, as done in image style transfer, or engineered based on the human auditory system. Experimental results on different types of audio signal confirm the potential of the proposed approach.Comment: ICASSP 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Apr 2018, Calgary, France. IEE

Characterizing resources in ubimus1 research: Volatility and rivalry

In this paper I identify three methodological approaches to creativitycentered design: the computational approach, the dialogical perspective and the ecologically grounded framework. And I analyze how these three methods relate to a current definition of the ubiquitous music field (ubimus). Social interaction is one of the factors to be accounted for in ubimus experimental studies. I propose the label social resources for the shared knowledge available within a community of practice. I identify five aspects of creativity-centered design that have targeted social resources. Then I discuss material resources as factors to be considered for the design of ubimus ecosystems and present two new design qualities as variables for experimental studies: volatility and rivalry. This discussion is framed by a split between creative products and creative resources which points to three observables: material resources, material products and material by-products, including creative waste. I conclude with a summary of the main proposals of the paper and point to applications of these concepts in experimental design studies

Introducing TaCEM and the TIAALS software.

This paper introduces the TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), funded for 30 months by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, investigating the relationship between technological innovation and creative practice in electroacoustic music of the last 40 years (http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchcentres/tacem/). It is a collaborative project between the universities of Huddersfield and Durham in the UK and outputs from the project will include a book and freely available interactive software. This paper explains the context for the project and its goals, and discusses some of the generic software that is being developed as part of the project, intended not only for use in the project itself but also to be freely available for others to use in the study of any electroacoustic work as appropriate

Erik Satie’s Socrate (1918), Myths of Marsyas, and un style dépouillé

In arguing that underneath the placid, 'stripped-down' style of Socrate there lurks a hidden violence, this essay does not focus on Satie's compositional process, documented in his notebooks; instead, it examines Socrate's performance history and the creation of the work's libretto, which the composer completed before sketching his musical ideas. Satie's novel selection and setting of the text is critical to this reading. The author examines how Satie reinterprets the violent myth of Marsyas and Apollo in the first movement, and how he ruminates on Socrates's dying words in the last movement. Understanding the ideas and events that led to the creation of Satie's enigmatic masterpiece allows us to view Socrate's portrayal of Plato's dialogues as part of a project of dépouillement, a neoclassical aesthetic that sought to strip down musical material in favor of an ascetic aesthetic uniting musical and moral Hellenism. This reading of Socrate allows us to reexamine the early 20th-century style dépouillé and to place Socrate at the center of debates on Socrates, Hellenism, and morality

Parsimonious relations between Guitar Textural Proposals

Guitar Textural Analysis is an analytical proposal devised for the composition for the guitar that exposes the relations between the textural structure and the technical procedures used in the instrumental performance. The Guitar Textural Proposals (GTPs) are the specific configurations extracted in this analytical process. In the present work, the focus remains on recognizing parsimonious movements between GTPs, that is, minimal distinctions between patterns of use of the instrument combined with respective textural configurations. Parsimoniousness is defined in the context of Developing Variation, Neo-Riemannian Theory, and Partitional Analysis. Previous works by Fabio Adour and authors Sérgio Freire and Pedro Cambraia present perspectives on the relation between texture and guitar performance. Leo Brouwer's series of progressive pieces Études Simples is adopted as a reference. The work results in a proposal for a ordered network of technical-textural configurations connected by parsimonious relations