Binzhu Sha

Zhiwei Lin, Jun Chen, Boshi Tang et al.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) constitute a crucial component of neural symbolic music generation, among which some works have yielded outstanding results and attracted considerable attention. Nevertheless, previous VAEs still encounter issues with overly long feature sequences and generated results lack contextual coherence, thus the challenge of modeling long multi-track symbolic music still remains unaddressed. To this end, we propose Multi-view MidiVAE, as one of the pioneers in VAE methods that effectively model and generate long multi-track symbolic music. The Multi-view MidiVAE utilizes the two-dimensional (2-D) representation, OctupleMIDI, to capture relationships among notes while reducing the feature sequences length. Moreover, we focus on instrumental characteristics and harmony as well as global and local information about the musical composition by employing a hybrid variational encoding-decoding strategy to integrate both Track- and Bar-view MidiVAE features. Objective and subjective experimental results on the CocoChorales dataset demonstrate that, compared to the baseline, Multi-view MidiVAE exhibits significant improvements in terms of modeling long multi-track symbolic music.

Wei Chen, Binzhu Sha, Dan Luo et al.

Singing Voice Conversion (SVC) transfers a source singer's timbre to a target while keeping melody and lyrics. The key challenge in any-to-any SVC is adapting unseen speaker timbres to source audio without quality degradation. Existing methods either face timbre leakage or fail to achieve satisfactory timbre similarity and quality in the generated audio. To address these challenges, we propose DAFMSVC, where the self-supervised learning (SSL) features from the source audio are replaced with the most similar SSL features from the target audio to prevent timbre leakage. It also incorporates a dual cross-attention mechanism for the adaptive fusion of speaker embeddings, melody, and linguistic content. Additionally, we introduce a flow matching module for high quality audio generation from the fused features. Experimental results show that DAFMSVC significantly enhances timbre similarity and naturalness, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective evaluations.

Wei Chen, Binzhu Sha, Jing Yang et al.

Melody preservation is crucial in singing voice conversion (SVC). However, in many scenarios, audio is often accompanied with background music (BGM), which can cause audio distortion and interfere with the extraction of melody and other key features, significantly degrading SVC performance. Previous methods have attempted to address this by using more robust neural network-based melody extractors, but their performance drops sharply in the presence of complex accompaniment. Other approaches involve performing source separation before conversion, but this often introduces noticeable artifacts, leading to a significant drop in conversion quality and increasing the user's operational costs. To address these issues, we introduce a novel SVC method that uses self-supervised representation-based melody features to improve melody modeling accuracy in the presence of BGM. In our experiments, we compare the effectiveness of different self-supervised learning (SSL) models for melody extraction and explore for the first time how SSL benefits the task of melody extraction. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SVC model significantly outperforms existing baseline methods in terms of melody accuracy and shows higher similarity and naturalness in both subjective and objective evaluations across noisy and clean audio environments.