Preeti Rao

Rishabh Dahale, Vaibhav Talwadker, Preeti Rao et al.

Creating a complex work of art like music necessitates profound creativity. With recent advancements in deep learning and powerful models such as transformers, there has been huge progress in automatic music generation. In an accompaniment generation context, creating a coherent drum pattern with apposite fills and improvisations at proper locations in a song is a challenging task even for an experienced drummer. Drum beats tend to follow a repetitive pattern through stanzas with fills or improvisation at section boundaries. In this work, we tackle the task of drum pattern generation conditioned on the accompanying music played by four melodic instruments: Piano, Guitar, Bass, and Strings. We use the transformer sequence to sequence model to generate a basic drum pattern conditioned on the melodic accompaniment to find that improvisation is largely absent, attributed possibly to its expectedly relatively low representation in the training data. We propose a novelty function to capture the extent of improvisation in a bar relative to its neighbors. We train a model to predict improvisation locations from the melodic accompaniment tracks. Finally, we use a novel BERT-inspired in-filling architecture, to learn the structure of both the drums and melody to in-fill elements of improvised music.

Yash Choudhary, Preeti Rao, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Accurately predicting music popularity is a critical challenge in the music industry, offering benefits to artists, producers, and streaming platforms. Prior research has largely focused on audio features, social metadata, or model architectures. This work addresses the under-explored role of lyrics in predicting popularity. We present an automated pipeline that uses LLM to extract high-dimensional lyric embeddings, capturing semantic, syntactic, and sequential information. These features are integrated into HitMusicLyricNet, a multimodal architecture that combines audio, lyrics, and social metadata for popularity score prediction in the range 0-100. Our method outperforms existing baselines on the SpotGenTrack dataset, which contains over 100,000 tracks, achieving 9% and 20% improvements in MAE and MSE, respectively. Ablation confirms that gains arise from our LLM-driven lyrics feature pipeline (LyricsAENet), underscoring the value of dense lyric representations.

Sandipan Dhar, Mayank Gupta, Preeti Rao

The field of Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) has seen significant advancements in recent years due to the rapid progress of diffusion-based approaches. However, capturing vocal style, genre-specific pitch inflections, and language-dependent characteristics remains challenging, particularly in low-resource scenarios. To address this, we propose LAPS-Diff, a diffusion model integrated with language-aware embeddings and a vocal-style guided learning mechanism, specifically designed for Bollywood Hindi singing style. We curate a Hindi SVS dataset and leverage pre-trained language models to extract word and phone-level embeddings for an enriched lyrics representation. Additionally, we incorporated a style encoder and a pitch extraction model to compute style and pitch losses, capturing features essential to the naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized singing, particularly in terms of vocal style and pitch variations. Furthermore, we utilize MERT and IndicWav2Vec models to extract musical and contextual embeddings, serving as conditional priors to refine the acoustic feature generation process further. Based on objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that LAPS-Diff significantly improves the quality of the generated samples compared to the considered state-of-the-art (SOTA) model for our constrained dataset that is typical of the low resource scenario.

Charvi Vitthal, Shreeharsha B S, Kamini Sabu et al.

Literacy assessment is an important activity for education administrators across the globe. Typically achieved in a school setting by testing a child's oral reading, it is intensive in human resources. While automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a potential solution to the problem, it tends to be computationally expensive for hand-held devices apart from needing language and accent-specific speech for training. In this work, we propose a system to predict the word-decoding skills of a student based on simple acoustic features derived from the recording. We first identify a meaningful categorization of word-decoding skills by analyzing a manually transcribed data set of children's oral reading recordings. Next the automatic prediction of the category is attempted with the proposed acoustic features. Pause statistics, syllable rate and spectral and intensity dynamics are found to be reliable indicators of specific types of oral reading deficits, providing useful feedback by discriminating the different characteristics of beginning readers. This computationally simple and language-agnostic approach is found to provide a performance close to that obtained using a language dependent ASR that required considerable tuning of its parameters.

Mithilesh Vaidya, Kamini Sabu, Preeti Rao

The detection of perceived prominence in speech has attracted approaches ranging from the design of linguistic knowledge-based acoustic features to the automatic feature learning from suprasegmental attributes such as pitch and intensity contours. We present here, in contrast, a system that operates directly on segmented speech waveforms to learn features relevant to prominent word detection for children's oral fluency assessment. The chosen CRNN (convolutional recurrent neural network) framework, incorporating both word-level features and sequence information, is found to benefit from the perceptually motivated SincNet filters as the first convolutional layer. We further explore the benefits of the linguistic association between the prosodic events of phrase boundary and prominence with different multi-task architectures. Matching the previously reported performance on the same dataset of a random forest ensemble predictor trained on carefully chosen hand-crafted acoustic features, we evaluate further the possibly complementary information from hand-crafted acoustic and pre-trained lexical features.

Rohit M. A., Preeti Rao

The tabla is a unique percussion instrument due to the combined harmonic and percussive nature of its timbre, and the contrasting harmonic frequency ranges of its two drums. This allows a tabla player to uniquely emphasize parts of the rhythmic cycle (theka) in order to mark the salient positions. An analysis of the loudness dynamics and timing deviations at various cycle positions is an important part of musicological studies on the expressivity in tabla accompaniment. To achieve this at a corpus-level, and not restrict it to the few recordings that manual annotation can afford, it is helpful to have access to an automatic tabla transcription system. Although a few systems have been built by training models on labeled tabla strokes, the achieved accuracy does not necessarily carry over to unseen instruments. In this article, we report our work towards building an instrument-independent stroke classification system for accompaniment tabla based on the more easily available tabla solo audio tracks. We present acoustic features that capture the distinctive characteristics of tabla strokes and build an automatic system to predict the label as one of a reduced, but musicologically motivated, target set of four stroke categories. To address the lack of sufficient labeled training data, we turn to common data augmentation methods and find the use of pitch-shifting based augmentation to be most promising. We then analyse the important features and highlight the problem of their instrument-dependence while motivating the use of more task-specific data augmentation strategies to improve the diversity of training data.

Kamini Sabu, Mithilesh Vaidya, Preeti Rao

Expressive reading, considered the defining attribute of oral reading fluency, comprises the prosodic realization of phrasing and prominence. In the context of evaluating oral reading, it helps to establish the speaker's comprehension of the text. We consider a labeled dataset of children's reading recordings for the speaker-independent detection of prominent words using acoustic-prosodic and lexico-syntactic features. A previous well-tuned random forest ensemble predictor is replaced by an RNN sequence classifier to exploit potential context dependency across the longer utterance. Further, deep learning is applied to obtain word-level features from low-level acoustic contours of fundamental frequency, intensity and spectral shape in an end-to-end fashion. Performance comparisons are presented across the different feature types and across different feature learning architectures for prominent word prediction to draw insights wherever possible.

Kamini Sabu, Syomantak Chaudhuri, Preeti Rao et al.

Syllable detection is an important speech analysis task with applications in speech rate estimation, word segmentation, and automatic prosody detection. Based on the well understood acoustic correlates of speech articulation, it has been realized by local peak picking on a frequency-weighted energy contour that represents vowel sonority. While several of the analysis parameters are set based on known speech signal properties, the selection of the frequency-weighting coefficients and peak-picking threshold typically involves heuristics, raising the possibility of data-based optimisation. In this work, we consider the optimization of the parameters based on the direct minimization of naturally arising task-specific objective functions. The resulting non-convex cost function is minimized using a population-based search algorithm to achieve a performance that exceeds previously published performance results on the same corpus using a relatively low amount of labeled data. Further, the optimisation of system parameters on a different corpus is shown to result in an explainable change in the optimal values.

Krishna Subramani, Preeti Rao

Generative Models for Audio Synthesis have been gaining momentum in the last few years. More recently, parametric representations of the audio signal have been incorporated to facilitate better musical control of the synthesized output. In this work, we investigate a parametric model for violin tones, in particular the generative modeling of the residual bow noise to make for more natural tone quality. To aid in our analysis, we introduce a dataset of Carnatic Violin Recordings where bow noise is an integral part of the playing style of higher pitched notes in specific gestural contexts. We obtain insights about each of the harmonic and residual components of the signal, as well as their interdependence, via observations on the latent space derived in the course of variational encoding of the spectral envelopes of the sustained sounds.

Rohit M. A., Preeti Rao

A Dhrupad vocal concert comprises a composition section that is interspersed with improvised episodes of increased rhythmic activity involving the interaction between the vocals and the percussion. Tracking the changing rhythmic density, in relation to the underlying metric tempo of the piece, thus facilitates the detection and labeling of the improvised sections in the concert structure. This work concerns the automatic detection of the musically relevant rhythmic densities as they change in time across the bandish (composition) performance. An annotated dataset of Dhrupad bandish concert sections is presented. We investigate a CNN-based system, trained to detect local tempo relationships, and follow it with temporal smoothing. We also employ audio source separation as a pre-processing step to the detection of the individual surface densities of the vocals and the percussion. This helps us obtain the complete musical description of the concert sections in terms of capturing the changing rhythmic interaction of the two performers.

Krishna Subramani, Preeti Rao, Alexandre D'Hooge

With the advent of data-driven statistical modeling and abundant computing power, researchers are turning increasingly to deep learning for audio synthesis. These methods try to model audio signals directly in the time or frequency domain. In the interest of more flexible control over the generated sound, it could be more useful to work with a parametric representation of the signal which corresponds more directly to the musical attributes such as pitch, dynamics and timbre. We present VaPar Synth - a Variational Parametric Synthesizer which utilizes a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) trained on a suitable parametric representation. We demonstrate our proposed model's capabilities via the reconstruction and generation of instrumental tones with flexible control over their pitch.

Jayneel Parekh, Preeti Rao, Yi-Hsuan Yang

In this paper our goal is to convert a set of spoken lines into sung ones. Unlike previous signal processing based methods, we take a learning based approach to the problem. This allows us to automatically model various aspects of this transformation, thus overcoming dependence on specific inputs such as high quality singing templates or phoneme-score synchronization information. Specifically, we propose an encoder--decoder framework for our task. Given time-frequency representations of speech and a target melody contour, we learn encodings that enable us to synthesize singing that preserves the linguistic content and timbre of the speaker while adhering to the target melody. We also propose a multi-task learning based objective to improve lyric intelligibility. We present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of our framework.

Krishna Subramani, Alexandre D'Hooge, Preeti Rao

Use a parametric representation of audio to train a generative model in the interest of obtaining more flexible control over the generated sound.

Amruta Vidwans, Prateek Verma, Preeti Rao

We present a melody based classification of musical styles by exploiting the pitch and energy based characteristics derived from the audio signal. Three prominent musical styles were chosen which have improvisation as integral part with similar melodic principles, theme, and structure of concerts namely, Hindustani, Carnatic and Turkish music. Listeners of one or more of these genres can discriminate between these based on the melodic contour alone. Listening tests were carried out using melodic attributes alone, on similar melodic pieces with respect to raga/makam, and removing any instrumentation cue to validate our hypothesis that style distinction is evident in the melody. Our method is based on finding a set of highly discriminatory features, derived from musicology, to capture distinct characteristics of the melodic contour. Behavior in terms of transitions of the pitch contour, the presence of micro-tonal notes and the nature of variations in the vocal energy are exploited. The automatically classified style labels are found to correlate well with subjective listening judgments. This was verified by using statistical tests to compare the labels from subjective and objective judgments. The melody based features, when combined with timbre based features, were seen to improve the classification performance.

Amruta Vidwans, Nachiket Deo, Preeti Rao

We investigate methods for the automatic labeling of the taan section, a prominent structural component of the Hindustani Khayal vocal concert. The taan contains improvised raga-based melody rendered in the highly distinctive style of rapid pitch and energy modulations of the voice. We propose computational features that capture these specific high-level characteristics of the singing voice in the polyphonic context. The extracted local features are used to achieve classification at the frame level via a trained multilayer perceptron (MLP) network, followed by grouping and segmentation based on novelty detection. We report high accuracies with reference to musician annotated taan sections across artists and concerts. We also compare the performance obtained by the compact specialized features with frame-level classification via a convolutional neural network (CNN) operating directly on audio spectrogram patches for the same task. While the relatively simple architecture we experiment with does not quite attain the classification accuracy of the hand-crafted features, it provides for a performance well above chance with interesting insights about the ability of the network to learn discriminative features effectively from labeled data.