Foley Music: Learning to Generate Music from Videos

In this paper, we introduce Foley Music, a system that can synthesize plausible music for a silent video clip about people playing musical instruments. We first identify two key intermediate representations for a successful video to music generator: body keypoints from videos and MIDI events from audio recordings. We then formulate music generation from videos as a motion-to-MIDI translation problem. We present a Graph$-$Transformer framework that can accurately predict MIDI event sequences in accordance with the body movements. The MIDI event can then be converted to realistic music using an off-the-shelf music synthesizer tool. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our models on videos containing a variety of music performances. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several existing systems in generating music that is pleasant to listen to. More importantly, the MIDI representations are fully interpretable and transparent, thus enabling us to perform music editing flexibly. We encourage the readers to watch the demo video with audio turned on to experience the results.Comment: ECCV 2020. Project page: http://foley-music.csail.mit.ed

Visually Guided Sound Source Separation using Cascaded Opponent Filter Network

The objective of this paper is to recover the original component signals from a mixture audio with the aid of visual cues of the sound sources. Such task is usually referred as visually guided sound source separation. The proposed Cascaded Opponent Filter (COF) framework consists of multiple stages, which recursively refine the source separation. A key element in COF is a novel opponent filter module that identifies and relocates residual components between sources. The system is guided by the appearance and motion of the source, and, for this purpose, we study different representations based on video frames, optical flows, dynamic images, and their combinations. Finally, we propose a Sound Source Location Masking (SSLM) technique, which, together with COF, produces a pixel level mask of the source location. The entire system is trained end-to-end using a large set of unlabelled videos. We compare COF with recent baselines and obtain the state-of-the-art performance in three challenging datasets (MUSIC, A-MUSIC, and A-NATURAL). Project page: https://ly-zhu.github.io/cof-net.Comment: main paper 14 pages, ref 3 pages, and supp 7 pages. Revised argument in section 3 and

Self-supervised object detection from audio-visual correspondence

We tackle the problem of learning object detectors without supervision. Differently from weakly-supervised object detection, we do not assume image-level class labels. Instead, we extract a supervisory signal from audio-visual data, using the audio component to "teach" the object detector. While this problem is related to sound source localisation, it is considerably harder because the detector must classify the objects by type, enumerate each instance of the object, and do so even when the object is silent. We tackle this problem by first designing a self-supervised framework with a contrastive objective that jointly learns to classify and localise objects. Then, without using any supervision, we simply use these self-supervised labels and boxes to train an image-based object detector. With this, we outperform previous unsupervised and weakly-supervised detectors for the task of object detection and sound source localization. We also show that we can align this detector to ground-truth classes with as little as one label per pseudo-class, and show how our method can learn to detect generic objects that go beyond instruments, such as airplanes and cats.Comment: Under revie