Nao Tokui

Atsuya Kobayashi, Ryogo Ishino, Ryuku Nobusue et al.

There is a long history of an effort made to explore musical elements with the entities and spaces around us, such as musique concrète and ambient music. In the context of computer music and digital art, interactive experiences that concentrate on the surrounding objects and physical spaces have also been designed. In recent years, with the development and popularization of devices, an increasing number of works have been designed in Extended Reality to create such musical experiences. In this paper, we describe MR4MR, a sound installation work that allows users to experience melodies produced from interactions with their surrounding space in the context of Mixed Reality (MR). Using HoloLens, an MR head-mounted display, users can bump virtual objects that emit sound against real objects in their surroundings. Then, by continuously creating a melody following the sound made by the object and re-generating randomly and gradually changing melody using music generation machine learning models, users can feel their ambient melody "reincarnating".

Nao Tokui, Tom Baker

We introduce a novel technique for creative audio resynthesis that operates by reworking the concept of granular synthesis at the latent vector level. Our approach creates a "granular codebook" by encoding a source audio corpus into latent vector segments, then matches each latent grain of a target audio signal to its closest counterpart in the codebook. The resulting hybrid sequence is decoded to produce audio that preserves the target's temporal structure while adopting the source's timbral characteristics. This technique requires no model training, works with diverse audio materials, and naturally avoids the discontinuities typical of traditional concatenative synthesis through the codec's implicit interpolation during decoding. We include supplementary material at https://github.com/naotokui/latentgranular/ , as well as a proof-of-concept implementation to allow users to experiment with their own sounds at https://huggingface.co/spaces/naotokui/latentgranular .

Nao Tokui

Since the introduction of deep learning, researchers have proposed content generation systems using deep learning and proved that they are competent to generate convincing content and artistic output, including music. However, one can argue that these deep learning-based systems imitate and reproduce the patterns inherent within what humans have created, instead of generating something new and creative. This paper focuses on music generation, especially rhythm patterns of electronic dance music, and discusses if we can use deep learning to generate novel rhythms, interesting patterns not found in the training dataset. We extend the framework of Generative Adversarial Networks(GAN) and encourage it to diverge from the dataset's inherent distributions by adding additional classifiers to the framework. The paper shows that our proposed GAN can generate rhythm patterns that sound like music rhythms but do not belong to any genres in the training dataset. The source code, generated rhythm patterns, and a supplementary plugin software for a popular Digital Audio Workstation software are available on our website.

Atsuya Kobayashi, Reo Anzai, Nao Tokui

We propose ExSampling: an integrated system of recording application and Deep Learning environment for a real-time music performance of environmental sounds sampled by field recording. Automated sound mapping to Ableton Live tracks by Deep Learning enables field recording to be applied to real-time performance, and create interactions among sound recorders, composers and performers.

Nao Tokui

There has been significant progress in the music generation technique utilizing deep learning. However, it is still hard for musicians and artists to use these techniques in their daily music-making practice. This paper proposes a Variational Autoencoder\cite{Kingma2014}(VAE)-based rhythm generation system, in which musicians can train a deep learning model only by selecting target MIDI files, then generate various rhythms with the model. The author has implemented the system as a plugin software for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), namely a Max for Live device for Ableton Live. Selected professional/semi-professional musicians and music producers have used the plugin, and they proved that the plugin is a useful tool for making music creatively. The plugin, source code, and demo videos are available online.