We propose an end-to-end music mixing style transfer system that converts the mixing style of an input multitrack to that of a reference song. This is achieved with an encoder pre-trained with a contrastive objective to extract only audio effects related information from a reference music recording. All our models are trained in a self-supervised manner from an already-processed wet multitrack dataset with an effective data preprocessing method that alleviates the data scarcity of obtaining unprocessed dry data. We analyze the proposed encoder for the disentanglement capability of audio effects and also validate its performance for mixing style transfer through both objective and subjective evaluations. From the results, we show the proposed system not only converts the mixing style of multitrack audio close to a reference but is also robust with mixture-wise style transfer upon using a music source separation model.
Self-supervised learning, especially contrastive learning, has made an outstanding contribution to the development of many deep learning research fields. Recently, researchers in the acoustic signal processing field noticed its success and leveraged contrastive learning for better music representation. Typically, existing approaches maximize the similarity between two distorted audio segments sampled from the same music. In other words, they ensure a semantic agreement at the music level. However, those coarse-grained methods neglect some inessential or noisy elements at the frame level, which…
Improving controllability or the ability to manipulate one or more attributes of the generated data has become a topic of interest in the context of deep generative models of music. Recent attempts in this direction have relied on learning disentangled representations from data such that the underlying factors of variation are well separated. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between disentanglement and controllability by conducting a systematic study using different supervised disentanglement learning algorithms based on the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) architecture. Our experimen…
In the context of music information retrieval, similarity-based approaches are useful for a variety of tasks that benefit from a query-by-example scenario. Music however, naturally decomposes into a set of semantically meaningful factors of variation. Current representation learning strategies pursue the disentanglement of such factors from deep representations, resulting in highly interpretable models. This allows the modeling of music similarity perception, which is highly subjective and multi-dimensional. While the focus of prior work is on metadata driven notions of similarity, we suggest …
Music similarity search is useful for a variety of creative tasks such as replacing one music recording with another recording with a similar "feel", a common task in video editing. For this task, it is typically necessary to define a similarity metric to compare one recording to another. Music similarity, however, is hard to define and depends on multiple simultaneous notions of similarity (i.e. genre, mood, instrument, tempo). While prior work ignore this issue, we embrace this idea and introduce the concept of multidimensional similarity and unify both global and specialized similarity metr…
While deep learning has enabled great advances in many areas of music, labeled music datasets remain especially hard, expensive, and time-consuming to create. In this work, we introduce SimCLR to the music domain and contribute a large chain of audio data augmentations to form a simple framework for self-supervised, contrastive learning of musical representations: CLMR. This approach works on raw time-domain music data and requires no labels to learn useful representations. We evaluate CLMR in the downstream task of music classification on the MagnaTagATune and Million Song datasets and presen…
Several automatic approaches for objective music performance assessment (MPA) have been proposed in the past, however, existing systems are not yet capable of reliably predicting ratings with the same accuracy as professional judges. This study investigates contrastive learning as a potential method to improve existing MPA systems. Contrastive learning is a widely used technique in representation learning to learn a structured latent space capable of separately clustering multiple classes. It has been shown to produce state of the art results for image-based classification problems. We introdu…
In this work, we propose a flexible method for generating variations of discrete sequences in which tokens can be grouped into basic units, like sentences in a text or bars in music. More precisely, given a template sequence, we aim at producing novel sequences sharing perceptible similarities with the original template without relying on any annotation; so our problem of generating variations is intimately linked to the problem of learning relevant high-level representations without supervision. Our contribution is two-fold: First, we propose a self-supervised encoding technique, named Vector…
Multi-Source Contrastive Learning from Musical Audio
Institute of Language and Speech Proc., Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心语言与语音研究所）；Institute of Robotics, Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心机器人研究所）；School of ECE, National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学电气与计算机工程学院）
Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST（韩国科学技术院文化技术研究生院）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Deep representation learning offers a powerful paradigm for mapping input data onto an organized embedding space and is useful for many music information retrieval tasks. Two central methods for representation learning include deep metric learning and classification, both having the same goal of learning a representation that can generalize well across tasks. Along with generalization, the emerging concept of disentangled representations is also of great interest, where multiple semantic concepts (e.g., genre, mood, instrumentation) are learned jointly but remain separable in the learned repre…
The common research goal of self-supervised learning is to extract a general representation which an arbitrary downstream task would benefit from. In this work, we investigate music audio representation learned from different contrastive self-supervised learning schemes and empirically evaluate the embedded vectors on various music information retrieval (MIR) tasks where different levels of the music perception are concerned. We analyze the results to discuss the proper direction of contrastive learning strategies for different MIR tasks. We show that these representations convey a comprehensi…
While deep generative models have become the leading methods for algorithmic composition, it remains a challenging problem to control the generation process because the latent variables of most deep-learning models lack good interpretability. Inspired by the content-style disentanglement idea, we design a novel architecture, under the VAE framework, that effectively learns two interpretable latent factors of polyphonic music: chord and texture. The current model focuses on learning 8-beat long piano composition segments. We show that such chord-texture disentanglement provides a controllable g…
Advanced music recommendation systems are being introduced along with the development of machine learning. However, it is essential to design a music recommendation system that can increase user satisfaction by understanding users' music tastes, not by the complexity of models. Although several studies related to music recommendation systems exploiting negative preferences have shown performance improvements, there was a lack of explanation on how they led to better recommendations. In this work, we analyze the role of negative preference in users' music tastes by comparing music recommendatio…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Controllable music generation with deep generative models has become increasingly reliant on disentanglement learning techniques. However, current disentanglement metrics, such as mutual information gap (MIG), are often inadequate and misleading when used for evaluating latent representations in the presence of interdependent semantic attributes often encountered in real-world music datasets. In this work, we propose a dependency-aware information metric as a drop-in replacement for MIG that accounts for the inherent relationship between semantic attributes.
Negative-free contrastive learning methods have attracted a lot of attention with simplicity and impressive performances for large-scale pretraining. However, its disentanglement property remains unexplored. In this paper, we examine negative-free contrastive learning methods to study the disentanglement property empirically. We find that existing disentanglement metrics fail to make meaningful measurements for high-dimensional representation models, so we propose a new disentanglement metric based on Mutual Information between latent representations and data factors. With this proposed metric…
Automatic music generation is an interdisciplinary research topic that combines computational creativity and semantic analysis of music to create automatic machine improvisations. An important property of such a system is allowing the user to specify conditions and desired properties of the generated music. In this paper we designed a model for composing melodies given a user specified symbolic scenario combined with a previous music context. We add manual labeled vectors denoting external music quality in terms of chord function that provides a low dimensional representation of the harmonic t…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；New York University Shanghai（上海纽约大学）
Learning symbolic music representations, especially disentangled representations with probabilistic interpretations, has been shown to benefit both music understanding and generation. However, most models are only applicable to short-term music, while learning long-term music representations remains a challenging task. We have seen several studies attempting to learn hierarchical representations directly in an end-to-end manner, but these models have not been able to achieve the desired results and the training process is not stable. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn long-ter…
Regional style in Chinese folk songs is a rich treasure that can be used for ethnic music creation and folk culture research. In this paper, we propose MG-VAE, a music generative model based on VAE (Variational Auto-Encoder) that is capable of capturing specific music style and generating novel tunes for Chinese folk songs (Min Ge) in a manipulatable way. Specifically, we disentangle the latent space of VAE into four parts in an adversarial training way to control the information of pitch and rhythm sequence, as well as of music style and content. In detail, two classifiers are used to separat…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
High-level musical qualities (such as emotion) are often abstract, subjective, and hard to quantify. Given these difficulties, it is not easy to learn good feature representations with supervised learning techniques, either because of the insufficiency of labels, or the subjectiveness (and hence large variance) in human-annotated labels. In this paper, we present a framework that can learn high-level feature representations with a limited amount of data, by first modelling their corresponding quantifiable low-level attributes. We refer to our proposed framework as Music FaderNets, which is ins…
Data cleansing is a well studied strategy for cleaning erroneous labels in datasets, which has not yet been widely adopted in Music Information Retrieval. Previously proposed data cleansing models do not consider structured (e.g. time varying) labels, such as those common to music data. We propose a novel data cleansing model for time-varying, structured labels which exploits the local structure of the labels, and demonstrate its usefulness for vocal note event annotations in music. %Our model is trained in a contrastive learning manner by automatically creating local deformations of likely co…
A key aspect of machine learning models lies in their ability to learn efficient intermediate features. However, the input representation plays a crucial role in this process, and polyphonic musical scores remain a particularly complex type of information. In this paper, we introduce a novel representation of symbolic music data, which transforms a polyphonic score into a continuous signal. We evaluate the ability to learn meaningful features from this representation from a musical point of view. Hence, we introduce an evaluation method relying on principled generation of synthetic data. Final…
Latent Space Disentanglement via Activation Steering for Interpretable Attribute Control in Symbolic Music Generation
Athens University of Economics；Innovation Lab Orfium Athens, Greece；Department of Music Technology；Acoustics Hellenic Mediterranean University Rethymno, Greece；Institute of Informatics \& Telecommunications National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos” Athens, Greece；Department of Informatics Athens University of Economics
Salesforce Research Asia（赛富时亚洲研究院）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Deep learning has been actively studied for time series forecasting, and the mainstream paradigm is based on the end-to-end training of neural network architectures, ranging from classical LSTM/RNNs to more recent TCNs and Transformers. Motivated by the recent success of representation learning in computer vision and natural language processing, we argue that a more promising paradigm for time series forecasting, is to first learn disentangled feature representations, followed by a simple regression fine-tuning step -- we justify such a paradigm from a causal perspective. Following this princi…
University of Seoul（首尔大学）；Korea University（高丽大学）；POSTECH（浦项科技大学）
Learning fair representation is crucial for achieving fairness or debiasing sensitive information. Most existing works rely on adversarial representation learning to inject some invariance into representation. However, adversarial learning methods are known to suffer from relatively unstable training, and this might harm the balance between fairness and predictiveness of representation. We propose a new approach, learning FAir Representation via distributional CONtrastive Variational AutoEncoder (FarconVAE), which induces the latent space to be disentangled into sensitive and nonsensitive part…
HKUST（香港科技大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；EIT（欧洲创新与技术学院）
From the intuitive notion of disentanglement, the image variations corresponding to different factors should be distinct from each other, and the disentangled representation should reflect those variations with separate dimensions. To discover the factors and learn disentangled representation, previous methods typically leverage an extra regularization term when learning to generate realistic images. However, the term usually results in a trade-off between disentanglement and generation quality. For the generative models pretrained without any disentanglement term, the generated images show se…
ZAYAN: Disentangled Contrastive Transformer for Tabular Remote Sensing Data
Lane Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering（兰恩计算机科学与电气工程系）；Dept. of Geology & Geography（地质与地理系）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；Green University of Bangladesh（孟加拉国绿色大学）；Stamford University Bangladesh（班加罗尔斯坦福大学）
Variational Autoencoders(VAEs) have already achieved great results on image generation and recently made promising progress on music generation. However, the generation process is still quite difficult to control in the sense that the learned latent representations lack meaningful music semantics. It would be much more useful if people can modify certain music features, such as rhythm and pitch contour, via latent representations to test different composition ideas. In this paper, we propose a new method to inspect the pitch and rhythm interpretations of the latent representations and we name …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；AZFT Joint Lab for Knowledge Engine（AZFT知识引擎联合实验室）；Hangzhou Innovation Center, Zhejiang University（浙江大学杭州国际科创中心）
Although the self-supervised pre-training of transformer models has resulted in the revolutionizing of natural language processing (NLP) applications and the achievement of state-of-the-art results with regard to various benchmarks, this process is still vulnerable to small and imperceptible permutations originating from legitimate inputs. Intuitively, the representations should be similar in the feature space with subtle input permutations, while large variations occur with different meanings. This motivates us to investigate the learning of robust textual representation in a contrastive mann…
University of Sussex（萨塞克斯大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
We present a Python library, called Midi Miner, that can calculate tonal tension and classify different tracks. MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface) is a hardware and software standard for communicating musical events between digital music devices. It is often used for tasks such as music representation, communication between devices, and even music generation [5]. Tension is an essential element of the music listening experience, which can come from a number of musical features including timbre, loudness and harmony [3]. Midi Miner provides a Python implementation for the tonal tension m…
