Tom Baker

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 .

Tom Baker, Javier Nistal

Text-to-audio diffusion models produce high-quality and diverse music but many, if not most, of the SOTA models lack the fine-grained, time-varying controls essential for music production. ControlNet enables attaching external controls to a pre-trained generative model by cloning and fine-tuning its encoder on new conditionings. However, this approach incurs a large memory footprint and restricts users to a fixed set of controls. We propose a lightweight, modular architecture that considerably reduces parameter count while matching ControlNet in audio quality and condition adherence. Our method offers greater flexibility and significantly lower memory usage, enabling more efficient training and deployment of independent controls. We conduct extensive objective and subjective evaluations and provide numerous audio examples on the accompanying website at https://lightlatentcontrol.github.io