Singing voice correction using canonical time warping

Expressive singing voice correction is an appealing but challenging problem. A robust time-warping algorithm which synchronizes two singing recordings can provide a promising solution. We thereby propose to address the problem by canonical time warping (CTW) which aligns amateur singing recordings to professional ones. A new pitch contour is generated given the alignment information, and a pitch-corrected singing is synthesized back through the vocoder. The objective evaluation shows that CTW is robust against pitch-shifting and time-stretching effects, and the subjective test demonstrates that CTW prevails the other methods including DTW and the commercial auto-tuning software. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method in a practical, real-world scenario

TimewarpVAE: Simultaneous Time-Warping and Representation Learning of Trajectories

Human demonstrations of trajectories are an important source of training data for many machine learning problems. However, the difficulty of collecting human demonstration data for complex tasks makes learning efficient representations of those trajectories challenging. For many problems, such as for handwriting or for quasistatic dexterous manipulation, the exact timings of the trajectories should be factored from their spatial path characteristics. In this work, we propose TimewarpVAE, a fully differentiable manifold-learning algorithm that incorporates Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to simultaneously learn both timing variations and latent factors of spatial variation. We show how the TimewarpVAE algorithm learns appropriate time alignments and meaningful representations of spatial variations in small handwriting and fork manipulation datasets. Our results have lower spatial reconstruction test error than baseline approaches and the learned low-dimensional representations can be used to efficiently generate semantically meaningful novel trajectories.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure

Sequence Alignment with Dirichlet Process Mixtures

We present a probabilistic model for unsupervised alignment of high-dimensional time-warped sequences based on the Dirichlet Process Mixture Model (DPMM). We follow the approach introduced in [Kazlauskaite,2018] of simultaneously representing each data sequence as a composition of a true underlying function and a time-warping, both of which are modelled using Gaussian processes (GPs), and aligning the underlying functions using an unsupervised alignment method. In [Kazlauskaite,2018] the alignment is performed using the GP latent variable model (GP-LVM) as a model of sequences, while our main contribution is extending this approach to using DPMM, which allows us to align the sequences temporally and cluster them at the same time. We show that the DPMM achieves competitive results in comparison to the GP-LVM on synthetic and real-world data sets, and discuss the different properties of the estimated underlying functions and the time-warps favoured by these models

Generating Labels for Regression of Subjective Constructs using Triplet Embeddings

Human annotations serve an important role in computational models where the target constructs under study are hidden, such as dimensions of affect. This is especially relevant in machine learning, where subjective labels derived from related observable signals (e.g., audio, video, text) are needed to support model training and testing. Current research trends focus on correcting artifacts and biases introduced by annotators during the annotation process while fusing them into a single annotation. In this work, we propose a novel annotation approach using triplet embeddings. By lifting the absolute annotation process to relative annotations where the annotator compares individual target constructs in triplets, we leverage the accuracy of comparisons over absolute ratings by human annotators. We then build a 1-dimensional embedding in Euclidean space that is indexed in time and serves as a label for regression. In this setting, the annotation fusion occurs naturally as a union of sets of sampled triplet comparisons among different annotators. We show that by using our proposed sampling method to find an embedding, we are able to accurately represent synthetic hidden constructs in time under noisy sampling conditions. We further validate this approach using human annotations collected from Mechanical Turk and show that we can recover the underlying structure of the hidden construct up to bias and scaling factors.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted journal pape

Sequence Alignment with Dirichlet Process Mixtures

We present a probabilistic model for unsupervised alignment of high-dimensional time-warped sequences based on the Dirichlet Process Mixture Model (DPMM). We follow the approach introduced in (Kazlauskaite, 2018) of simultaneously representing each data sequence as a composition of a true underlying function and a time-warping, both of which are modelled using Gaussian processes (GPs) (Rasmussen, 2005), and aligning the underlying functions using an unsupervised alignment method. In (Kazlauskaite, 2018) the alignment is performed using the GP latent variable model (GP-LVM) (Lawrence, 2005) as a model of sequences, while our main contribution is extending this approach to using DPMM, which allows us to align the sequences temporally and cluster them at the same time. We show that the DPMM achieves competitive results in comparison to the GP-LVM on synthetic and real-world data sets, and discuss the different properties of the estimated underlying functions and the time-warps favoured by these models.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, "All Of Bayesian Nonparametrics" Workshop at the 32nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (BNP@NeurIPS2018