The Shape of RemiXXXes to Come: Audio Texture Synthesis with Time-frequency Scattering
This work addresses audio synthesis and transformation for music production and sound design, but it is incremental as it builds on existing scattering transform methods.
The paper tackles audio texture synthesis and manipulation by applying time-frequency scattering with phase retrieval via gradient backpropagation, resulting in the creation of four electroacoustic pieces and a remix released by Warp Records.
This article explains how to apply time--frequency scattering, a convolutional operator extracting modulations in the time--frequency domain at different rates and scales, to the re-synthesis and manipulation of audio textures. After implementing phase retrieval in the scattering network by gradient backpropagation, we introduce scale--rate DAFx, a class of audio transformations expressed in the domain of time--frequency scattering coefficients. One example of scale--rate DAFx is chirp rate inversion, which causes each sonic event to be locally reversed in time while leaving the arrow of time globally unchanged. Over the past two years, our work has led to the creation of four electroacoustic pieces: ``FAVN''; ``Modulator (Scattering Transform)''; ``Experimental Palimpsest''; ``Inspection''; and a remix of Lorenzo Senni's ``XAllegroX'', released by Warp Records on a vinyl entitled ``The Shape of RemiXXXes to Come''. The source code to reproduce experiments and figures is made freely available at: https://github.com/lostanlen/scattering.m. A companion website containing demos is at: https://lostanlen.com/pubs/dafx2019