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Musicians and nonmusicians alike use rhythmic sound gestures, such as tapping and beatboxing, to express drum patterns. While these gestures effectively communicate musical ideas, realizing these ideas as fully-produced drum recordings can be time-consuming, potentially disrupting many creative workflows. To bridge this gap, we present TRIA (The Rhythm In Anything), a masked transformer model for mapping rhythmic sound gestures to high-fidelity drum recordings. Given an audio prompt of the desired rhythmic pattern and a second prompt to represent drum kit timbre, TRIA produces audio of a drum kit playing the desired rhythm (with appropriate elaborations) in the desired timbre. Subjective and objective evaluations show that a TRIA model trained on less than 10 hours of publicly-available drum data can generate high-quality, faithful realizations of sound gestures across a wide range of timbres in a zero-shot manner. 

In the audio modality, state-of-the-art watermarking methods leverage deep neural networks to allow the embedding of human-imperceptible signatures in generated audio. The ideal is to embed signatures that can be detected with highaccuracy when the watermarked audio is altered via compression, filtering, or other transformations. Existing audio watermarking techniques operate in a post-hoc manner, manipulating “low-level” features of audio recordings after generation (e.g. through the addition of a low-magnitude watermark signal). We show that this post-hoc formulation makes existing audio watermarks vulnerable to transformation-based removal attacks. Focusing on speech audio, we (1) unify and extend existing evaluations of the effect of audio transformations on watermark detectability, and (2) demonstrate that state-of-the-art post-hoc audio watermarks can be removed with no knowledge of the watermarking scheme and minimal degradation in audio quality 

This work introduces Text2FX, a method that leverages CLAP embeddings and differentiable digital signal processing to control audio effects, such as equalization and reverberation, using open-vocabulary natural language prompts (e.g., ``make this sound in-your-face and bold''). Text2FX operates without retraining any models, relying instead on single-instance optimization within the existing embedding space, thus enabling a flexible, scalable approach to open-vocabulary sound transformations through interpretable and disentangled FX manipulation. We show that CLAP encodes valuable information for controlling audio effects and propose two optimization approaches using CLAP to map text to audio effect parameters. While we demonstrate with CLAP, this approach is applicable to any shared text-audio embedding space. Similarly, while we demonstrate with equalization and reverberation, any differentiable audio effect may be controlled. We conduct a listener study with diverse text prompts and source audio to evaluate the quality and alignment of these methods with human perception. Demos and code are available at anniejchu.github.io/text2fx 

Neural codecs have demonstrated strong performance in high-fidelity compression of audio signals at low bitrates. The token-based representations produced by these codecs have proven particularly useful for generative modeling. While much research has focused on improvements in compression ratio and perceptual transparency, recent works have largely overlooked another desirable codec property -- \textit{idempotence}, the stability of compressed outputs under multiple rounds of encoding. We find that state-of-the-art neural codecs exhibit varied degrees of idempotence, with some degrading audio outputs significantly after as few as three encodings. We investigate possible causes of low idempotence and devise a method for improving idempotence through fine-tuning a codec model. We then examine the effect of idempotence on a simple conditional generative modeling task, and find that increased idempotence can be achieved without negatively impacting downstream modeling performance -- potentially extending the usefulness of neural codecs for practical file compression and iterative generative modeling workflows. 

We present Sketch2Sound, a generative audio model capable of creating high-quality sounds from a set of interpretable time-varying control signals: loudness, brightness, and pitch, as well as text prompts. Sketch2Sound can synthesize arbitrary sounds from sonic imitations (i.e.,~a vocal imitation or a reference sound-shape). Sketch2Sound can be implemented on top of any text-to-audio latent diffusion transformer (DiT), and requires only 40k steps of fine-tuning and a single linear layer per control, making it more lightweight than existing methods like ControlNet. To synthesize from sketchlike sonic imitations, we propose applying random median filters to the control signals during training, allowing Sketch2Sound to be prompted using controls with flexible levels of temporal specificity. We show that Sketch2Sound can synthesize sounds that follow the gist of input controls from a vocal imitation while retaining the adherence to an input text prompt and audio quality compared to a text-only baseline. Sketch2Sound allows sound artists to create sounds with the semantic flexibility of text prompts and the expressivity and precision of a sonic gesture or vocal imitation. 

Every artist has a creative process that draws inspiration from previous artists and their works. Today, “inspiration” has been automated by generative music models. The black box nature of these models obscures the identity of the works that influence their creative output. As a result, users may inadvertently appropriate, misuse, or copy existing artists’ works. We establish a replicable methodology to systematically identify similar pieces of music audio in a manner that is useful for understanding training data attribution. A key aspect of our approach is to harness an effective music audio similarity measure. We compare the effect of applying CLMR [50] and CLAP [55] embeddings to similarity measurement in a set of 5 million audio clips used to train VampNet [24], a recent open source generative music model. We validate this approach with a human listening study. We also explore the effect that modifications of an audio example (e.g., pitch shifting, time stretching, background noise) have on similarity measurements. This work is foundational to incorporating automated influence attribution into generative modeling, which promises to let model creators and users move from ignorant appropriation to informed creation. Audio samples that accompany this paper are available at https://tinyurl.com/exploring-musical-roots. 

We introduce VampNet, a masked acoustic token modeling approach to music synthesis, compression, inpainting, and variation. We use a variable masking schedule during training which allows us to sample coherent music from the model by applying a variety of masking approaches (called prompts) during inference. VampNet is non-autoregressive, leveraging a bidirectional transformer architecture that attends to all tokens in a forward pass. With just 36 sampling passes, VampNet can generate coherent high-fidelity musical waveforms. We show that by prompting VampNet in various ways, we can apply it to tasks like music compression, inpainting, outpainting, continuation, and looping with variation (vamping). Appropriately prompted, VampNet is capable of maintaining style, genre, instrumentation, and other high-level aspects of the music. This flexible prompting capability makes VampNet a powerful music co-creation tool. Code andaudio samples are available online.