The rise of deep learning algorithms has led many researchers to withdraw from using classic signal processing methods for sound generation. Deep learning models have achieved expressive voice synthesis, realistic sound textures, and musical notes from virtual instruments. However, the most suitable deep learning architecture is still under investigation. The choice of architecture is tightly coupled to the audio representations. A sound's original waveform can be too dense and rich for deep learning models to deal with efficiently - and complexity increases training time and computational cost. Also, it does not represent sound in the manner in which it is perceived. Therefore, in many cases, the raw audio has been transformed into a compressed and more meaningful form using upsampling, feature-extraction, or even by adopting a higher level illustration of the waveform. Furthermore, conditional on the form chosen, additional conditioning representations, different model architectures, and numerous metrics for evaluating the reconstructed sound have been investigated. This paper provides an overview of audio representations applied to sound synthesis using deep learning. Additionally, it presents the most significant methods for developing and evaluating a sound synthesis architecture using deep learning models, always depending on the audio representation.
Audio event detection is a widely studied audio processing task, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to healthcare. In-the-wild datasets such as Audioset have propelled research in this field. However, many efforts typically involve manual annotation and verification, which is expensive to perform at scale. Movies depict various real-life and fictional scenarios which makes them a rich resource for mining a wide-range of audio events. In this work, we present a dataset of audio events called Subtitle-Aligned Movie Sounds (SAM-S). We use publicly-available closed-caption transcript…
We study the merit of transfer learning for two sound recognition problems, i.e., audio tagging and sound event detection. Employing feature fusion, we adapt a baseline system utilizing only spectral acoustic inputs to also make use of pretrained auditory and visual features, extracted from networks built for different tasks and trained with external data. We perform experiments with these modified models on an audiovisual multi-label data set, of which the training partition contains a large number of unlabeled samples and a smaller amount of clips with weak annotations, indicating the clip-l…
Automated Audio Captioning is a cross-modal task, generating natural language descriptions to summarize the audio clips' sound events. However, grounding the actual sound events in the given audio based on its corresponding caption has not been investigated. This paper contributes an AudioGrounding dataset, which provides the correspondence between sound events and the captions provided in Audiocaps, along with the location (timestamps) of each present sound event. Based on such, we propose the text-to-audio grounding (TAG) task, which interactively considers the relationship between audio pro…
Sony CSL（索尼计算机科学实验室）；CentraleSupélec（巴黎中央理工-高等电力学院）
In this paper, we propose a novel score-base generative model for unconditional raw audio synthesis. Our proposal builds upon the latest developments on diffusion process modeling with stochastic differential equations, which already demonstrated promising results on image generation. We motivate novel heuristics for the choice of the diffusion processes better suited for audio generation, and consider the use of a conditional U-Net to approximate the score function. While previous approaches on diffusion models on audio were mainly designed as speech vocoders in medium resolution, our method …
This technical report proposes an audio captioning system for DCASE 2021 Task 6 audio captioning challenge. Our proposed model is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU) using pretrained audio features and sound event detection. A pretrained neural network (PANN) is used to extract audio features and Word2Vec is selected with the aim of extracting word embeddings from the audio captions. To create semantically meaningful captions, we extract sound events from the audio clips and feed the encoder-decoder architecture with sound events in additi…
Epic-Sounds: A Large-scale Dataset of Actions That Sound
Visual Geometry Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, UK（牛津大学视觉几何组）；Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK（布里斯托大学计算机科学系）；CIIRC, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic（布拉格捷克技术大学CIIRC）
Recognizing sounds is a key aspect of computational audio scene analysis and machine perception. In this paper, we advocate that sound recognition is inherently a multi-modal audiovisual task in that it is easier to differentiate sounds using both the audio and visual modalities as opposed to one or the other. We present an audiovisual fusion model that learns to recognize sounds from weakly labeled video recordings. The proposed fusion model utilizes an attention mechanism to dynamically combine the outputs of the individual audio and visual models. Experiments on the large scale sound events…
In this paper, we propose the use of spatial and harmonic features in combination with long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) for automatic sound event detection (SED) task. Real life sound recordings typically have many overlapping sound events, making it hard to recognize with just mono channel audio. Human listeners have been successfully recognizing the mixture of overlapping sound events using pitch cues and exploiting the stereo (multichannel) audio signal available at their ears to spatially localize these events. Traditionally SED systems have only been using mono…
Generating Diverse Audio-Visual 360 Soundscapes for Sound Event Localization and Detection
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）；Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas（塔毛利帕斯自治大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽皇后学院）
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Recent progress in deep learning has enabled many advances in sound separation and visual scene understanding. However, extracting sound sources which are apparent in natural videos remains an open problem. In this work, we present AudioScope, a novel audio-visual sound separation framework that can be trained without supervision to isolate on-screen sound sources from real in-the-wild videos. Prior audio-visual separation work assumed artificial limitations on the domain of sound classes (e.g., to speech or music), constrained the number of sources, and required strong sound separation or vis…
Recent work on audio-visual navigation targets a single static sound in noise-free audio environments and struggles to generalize to unheard sounds. We introduce the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark in which an embodied AI agent must catch a moving sound source in an unmapped environment in the presence of distractors and noisy sounds. We propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning approach that relies on a multi-modal architecture that fuses the spatial audio-visual information from a binaural audio signal and spatial occupancy maps to encode the features needed to learn a rob…
This paper introduces the Procedural (audio) Variational autoEncoder (ProVE) framework as a general approach to learning Procedural Audio PA models of environmental sounds with an improvement to the realism of the synthesis while maintaining provision of control over the generated sound through adjustable parameters. The framework comprises two stages: (i) Audio Class Representation, in which a latent representation space is defined by training an audio autoencoder, and (ii) Control Mapping, in which a joint function of static/temporal control variables derived from the audio and a random samp…
Audio-visual navigation combines sight and hearing to navigate to a sound-emitting source in an unmapped environment. While recent approaches have demonstrated the benefits of audio input to detect and find the goal, they focus on clean and static sound sources and struggle to generalize to unheard sounds. In this work, we propose the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark which requires catching a moving sound source in an environment with noisy and distracting sounds, posing a range of new challenges. We introduce a reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust navigation pol…
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
We explore active audio-visual separation for dynamic sound sources, where an embodied agent moves intelligently in a 3D environment to continuously isolate the time-varying audio stream being emitted by an object of interest. The agent hears a mixed stream of multiple audio sources (e.g., multiple people conversing and a band playing music at a noisy party). Given a limited time budget, it needs to extract the target sound accurately at every step using egocentric audio-visual observations. We propose a reinforcement learning agent equipped with a novel transformer memory that learns motion p…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology（乔莫·肯雅塔农业技术大学）
Machine hearing of the environmental sound is one of the important issues in the audio recognition domain. It gives the machine the ability to discriminate between the different input sounds that guides its decision making. In this work we exploit the self-supervised contrastive technique and a shallow 1D CNN to extract the distinctive audio features (audio representations) without using any explicit annotations.We generate representations of a given audio using both its raw audio waveform and spectrogram and evaluate if the proposed learner is agnostic to the type of audio input. We further u…
Reusing recorded sounds (sampling) is a key component in Electronic Music Production (EMP), which has been present since its early days and is at the core of genres like hip-hop or jungle. Commercial and non-commercial services allow users to obtain collections of sounds (sample packs) to reuse in their compositions. Automatic classification of one-shot instrumental sounds allows automatically categorising the sounds contained in these collections, allowing easier navigation and better characterisation. Automatic instrument classification has mostly targeted the classification of unprocessed i…
Spooky Audio；University of Victoria（维多利亚大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
We release synth1B1, a multi-modal audio corpus consisting of 1 billion 4-second synthesized sounds, paired with the synthesis parameters used to generate them. The dataset is 100x larger than any audio dataset in the literature. We also introduce torchsynth, an open source modular synthesizer that generates the synth1B1 samples on-the-fly at 16200x faster than real-time (714MHz) on a single GPU. Finally, we release two new audio datasets: FM synth timbre and subtractive synth pitch. Using these datasets, we demonstrate new rank-based evaluation criteria for existing audio representations. Fin…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Fictional University（虚构大学）；University of the Imagination（想象大学）
The Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 challenge focuses on audio tagging, sound event detection and spatial localisation. DCASE 2019 consists of five tasks: 1) acoustic scene classification, 2) audio tagging with noisy labels and minimal supervision, 3) sound event localisation and detection, 4) sound event detection in domestic environments, and 5) urban sound tagging. In this paper, we propose generic cross-task baseline systems based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The motivation is to investigate the performance of a variety of models across s…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We introduce AudioScopeV2, a state-of-the-art universal audio-visual on-screen sound separation system which is capable of learning to separate sounds and associate them with on-screen objects by looking at in-the-wild videos. We identify several limitations of previous work on audio-visual on-screen sound separation, including the coarse resolution of spatio-temporal attention, poor convergence of the audio separation model, limited variety in training and evaluation data, and failure to account for the trade off between preservation of on-screen sounds and suppression of off-screen sounds. W…
Many state-of-the-art systems for audio tagging and sound event detection employ convolutional recurrent neural architectures. Typically, they are trained in a mean teacher setting to deal with the heterogeneous annotation of the available data. In this work, we present a thorough analysis of how changing the temporal resolution of these convolutional recurrent neural networks - which can be done by simply adapting their pooling operations - impacts their performance. By using a variety of evaluation metrics, we investigate the effects of adapting this design parameter under several sound reco…
Although several research works have been reported on audio-visual sound source localization in unconstrained videos, no datasets and metrics have been proposed in the literature to quantitatively evaluate its performance. Defining the ground truth for sound source localization is difficult, because the location where the sound is produced is not limited to the range of the source object, but the vibrations propagate and spread through the surrounding objects. Therefore we propose a new concept, Sounding Object, to reduce the ambiguity of the visual location of sound, making it possible to ann…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）
Detecting sound source objects within visual observation is important for autonomous robots to comprehend surrounding environments. Since sounding objects have a large variety with different appearances in our living environments, labeling all sounding objects is impossible in practice. This calls for self-supervised learning which does not require manual labeling. Most of conventional self-supervised learning uses monaural audio signals and images and cannot distinguish sound source objects having similar appearances due to poor spatial information in audio signals. To solve this problem, thi…
As sound event classification moves towards larger datasets, issues of label noise become inevitable. Web sites can supply large volumes of user-contributed audio and metadata, but inferring labels from this metadata introduces errors due to unreliable inputs, and limitations in the mapping. There is, however, little research into the impact of these errors. To foster the investigation of label noise in sound event classification we present FSDnoisy18k, a dataset containing 42.5 hours of audio across 20 sound classes, including a small amount of manually-labeled data and a larger quantity of r…
We propose a method of separating a desired sound source from a single-channel mixture, based on either a textual description or a short audio sample of the target source. This is achieved by combining two distinct models. The first model, SoundWords, is trained to jointly embed both an audio clip and its textual description to the same embedding in a shared representation. The second model, SoundFilter, takes a mixed source audio clip as an input and separates it based on a conditioning vector from the shared text-audio representation defined by SoundWords, making the model agnostic to the co…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
With the development of deep learning and artificial intelligence, audio synthesis has a pivotal role in the area of machine learning and shows strong applicability in the industry. Meanwhile, significant efforts have been dedicated by researchers to handle multimodal tasks at present such as audio-visual multimodal processing. In this paper, we conduct a survey on audio synthesis and audio-visual multimodal processing, which helps understand current research and future trends. This review focuses on text to speech(TTS), music generation and some tasks that combine visual and acoustic informat…
A long-standing goal in the field of sensory substitution is to enable sound perception for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people by visualizing audio content. Different from existing models that translate to hand sign language, between speech and text, or text and images, we target immediate and low-level audio to video translation that applies to generic environment sounds as well as human speech. Since such a substitution is artificial, without labels for supervised learning, our core contribution is to build a mapping from audio to video that learns from unpaired examples via high-level co…
Audio denoising has been explored for decades using both traditional and deep learning-based methods. However, these methods are still limited to either manually added artificial noise or lower denoised audio quality. To overcome these challenges, we collect a large-scale natural noise bird sound dataset. We are the first to transfer the audio denoising problem into an image segmentation problem and propose a deep visual audio denoising (DVAD) model. With a total of 14,120 audio images, we develop an audio ImageMask tool and propose to use a few-shot generalization strategy to label these imag…
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs（三菱电机研究实验室）
There exists an unequivocal distinction between the sound produced by a static source and that produced by a moving one, especially when the source moves towards or away from the microphone. In this paper, we propose to use this connection between audio and visual dynamics for solving two challenging tasks simultaneously, namely: (i) separating audio sources from a mixture using visual cues, and (ii) predicting the 3D visual motion of a sounding source using its separated audio. Towards this end, we present Audio Separator and Motion Predictor (ASMP) -- a deep learning framework that leverages…
Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, UK（视觉、语音和信号处理中心（CVSSP），英国萨里大学）；Tencent AI Lab, Bellevue, WA, USA（腾讯AI实验室，美国西雅图）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing, China（北京科技大学计算机科学与技术系）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)（香港中文大学）
Vrije University of Brussels（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre（校际微电子中心）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
A key function of auditory cognition is the association of characteristic sounds with their corresponding semantics over time. Humans attempting to discriminate between fine-grained audio categories, often replay the same discriminative sounds to increase their prediction confidence. We propose an end-to-end attention-based architecture that through selective repetition attends over the most discriminative sounds across the audio sequence. Our model initially uses the full audio sequence and iteratively refines the temporal segments replayed based on slot attention. At each playback, the selec…
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Target sound detection (TSD) aims to detect the target sound from a mixture audio given the reference information. Previous methods use a conditional network to extract a sound-discriminative embedding from the reference audio, and then use it to detect the target sound from the mixture audio. However, the network performs much differently when using different reference audios (e.g. performs poorly for noisy and short-duration reference audios), and tends to make wrong decisions for transient events (i.e. shorter than $1$ second). To overcome these problems, in this paper, we present a referen…
The Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 challenge focuses on audio tagging, sound event detection and spatial localisation. DCASE 2019 consists of five tasks: 1) acoustic scene classification, 2) audio tagging with noisy labels and minimal supervision, 3) sound event localisation and detection, 4) sound event detection in domestic environments, and 5) urban sound tagging. In this paper, we propose generic cross-task baseline systems based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The motivation is to investigate the performance of a variety of models across s…
