JukeDrummer: Conditional Beat-aware Audio-domain Drum Accompaniment Generation via Transformer VQ-VAE
This addresses the problem of automated music accompaniment generation for musicians or producers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing VQ-VAE and Transformer methods.
The paper tackles generating drum tracks for drum-free audio recordings by training a Transformer model with VQ-VAE encoding and beat-aware features, resulting in rhythmically and stylistically consistent drum accompaniment as validated by objective and subjective evaluations.
This paper proposes a model that generates a drum track in the audio domain to play along to a user-provided drum-free recording. Specifically, using paired data of drumless tracks and the corresponding human-made drum tracks, we train a Transformer model to improvise the drum part of an unseen drumless recording. We combine two approaches to encode the input audio. First, we train a vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to represent the input audio with discrete codes, which can then be readily used in a Transformer. Second, using an audio-domain beat tracking model, we compute beat-related features of the input audio and use them as embeddings in the Transformer. Instead of generating the drum track directly as waveforms, we use a separate VQ-VAE to encode the mel-spectrogram of a drum track into another set of discrete codes, and train the Transformer to predict the sequence of drum-related discrete codes. The output codes are then converted to a mel-spectrogram with a decoder, and then to the waveform with a vocoder. We report both objective and subjective evaluations of variants of the proposed model, demonstrating that the model with beat information generates drum accompaniment that is rhythmically and stylistically consistent with the input audio.