Bridging High-Quality Audio and Video via Language for Sound Effects Retrieval from Visual Queries

Finding the right sound effects (SFX) to match moments in a video is a difficult and time-consuming task, and relies heavily on the quality and completeness of text metadata. Retrieving high-quality (HQ) SFX using a video frame directly as the query is an attractive alternative, removing the reliance on text metadata and providing a low barrier to entry for non-experts. Due to the lack of HQ audio-visual training data, previous work on audio-visual retrieval relies on YouTube (in-the-wild) videos of varied quality for training, where the audio is often noisy and the video of amateur quality. As such it is unclear whether these systems would generalize to the task of matching HQ audio to production-quality video. To address this, we propose a multimodal framework for recommending HQ SFX given a video frame by (1) leveraging large language models and foundational vision-language models to bridge HQ audio and video to create audio-visual pairs, resulting in a highly scalable automatic audio-visual data curation pipeline; and (2) using pre-trained audio and visual encoders to train a contrastive learning-based retrieval system. We show that our system, trained using our automatic data curation pipeline, significantly outperforms baselines trained on in-the-wild data on the task of HQ SFX retrieval for video. Furthermore, while the baselines fail to generalize to this task, our system generalizes well from clean to in-the-wild data, outperforming the baselines on a dataset of YouTube videos despite only being trained on the HQ audio-visual pairs. A user study confirms that people prefer SFX retrieved by our system over the baseline 67% of the time both for HQ and in-the-wild data. Finally, we present ablations to determine the impact of model and data pipeline design choices on downstream retrieval performance. Please visit our project website to listen to and view our SFX retrieval results.

Language-Guided Music Recommendation for Video via Prompt Analogies

We propose a method to recommend music for an input video while allowing a user to guide music selection with free-form natural language. A key challenge of this problem setting is that existing music video datasets provide the needed (video, music) training pairs, but lack text descriptions of the music. This work addresses this challenge with the following three contributions. First, we propose a text-synthesis approach that relies on an analogy-based prompting procedure to generate natural language music descriptions from a large-scale language model (BLOOM-176B) given pre-trained music tagger outputs and a small number of human text descriptions. Second, we use these synthesized music descriptions to train a new trimodal model, which fuses text and video input representations to query music samples. For training, we introduce a text dropout regularization mechanism which we show is critical to model performance. Our model design allows for the retrieved music audio to agree with the two input modalities by matching visual style depicted in the video and musical genre, mood, or instrumentation described in the natural language query. Third, to evaluate our approach, we collect a testing dataset for our problem by annotating a subset of 4k clips from the YT8M-MusicVideo dataset with natural language music descriptions which we make publicly available. We show that our approach can match or exceed the performance of prior methods on video-to-music retrieval while significantly improving retrieval accuracy when using text guidance.

Efficient Spoken Language Recognition via Multilabel Classification

Spoken language recognition (SLR) is the task of automatically identifying the language present in a speech signal. Existing SLR models are either too computationally expensive or too large to run effectively on devices with limited resources. For real-world deployment, a model should also gracefully handle unseen languages outside of the target language set, yet prior work has focused on closed-set classification where all input languages are known a-priori. In this paper we address these two limitations: we explore efficient model architectures for SLR based on convolutional networks, and propose a multilabel training strategy to handle non-target languages at inference time. Using the VoxLingua107 dataset, we show that our models obtain competitive results while being orders of magnitude smaller and faster than current state-of-the-art methods, and that our multilabel strategy is more robust to unseen non-target languages compared to multiclass classification.

Conditional Generation of Audio from Video via Foley Analogies

The sound effects that designers add to videos are designed to convey a particular artistic effect and, thus, may be quite different from a scene's true sound. Inspired by the challenges of creating a soundtrack for a video that differs from its true sound, but that nonetheless matches the actions occurring on screen, we propose the problem of conditional Foley. We present the following contributions to address this problem. First, we propose a pretext task for training our model to predict sound for an input video clip using a conditional audio-visual clip sampled from another time within the same source video. Second, we propose a model for generating a soundtrack for a silent input video, given a user-supplied example that specifies what the video should "sound like". We show through human studies and automated evaluation metrics that our model successfully generates sound from video, while varying its output according to the content of a supplied example. Project site: https://xypb.github.io/CondFoleyGen/

Language-Guided Audio-Visual Source Separation via Trimodal Consistency

We propose a self-supervised approach for learning to perform audio source separation in videos based on natural language queries, using only unlabeled video and audio pairs as training data. A key challenge in this task is learning to associate the linguistic description of a sound-emitting object to its visual features and the corresponding components of the audio waveform, all without access to annotations during training. To overcome this challenge, we adapt off-the-shelf vision-language foundation models to provide pseudo-target supervision via two novel loss functions and encourage a stronger alignment between the audio, visual and natural language modalities. During inference, our approach can separate sounds given text, video and audio input, or given text and audio input alone. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our self-supervised approach on three audio-visual separation datasets, including MUSIC, SOLOS and AudioSet, where we outperform state-of-the-art strongly supervised approaches despite not using object detectors or text labels during training.

Audio-Text Models Do Not Yet Leverage Natural Language

Multi-modal contrastive learning techniques in the audio-text domain have quickly become a highly active area of research. Most works are evaluated with standard audio retrieval and classification benchmarks assuming that (i) these models are capable of leveraging the rich information contained in natural language, and (ii) current benchmarks are able to capture the nuances of such information. In this work, we show that state-of-the-art audio-text models do not yet really understand natural language, especially contextual concepts such as sequential or concurrent ordering of sound events. Our results suggest that existing benchmarks are not sufficient to assess these models' capabilities to match complex contexts from the audio and text modalities. We propose a Transformer-based architecture and show that, unlike prior work, it is capable of modeling the sequential relationship between sound events in the text and audio, given appropriate benchmark data. We advocate for the collection or generation of additional, diverse, data to allow future research to fully leverage natural language for audio-text modeling.

It's Time for Artistic Correspondence in Music and Video

We present an approach for recommending a music track for a given video, and vice versa, based on both their temporal alignment and their correspondence at an artistic level. We propose a self-supervised approach that learns this correspondence directly from data, without any need of human annotations. In order to capture the high-level concepts that are required to solve the task, we propose modeling the long-term temporal context of both the video and the music signals, using Transformer networks for each modality. Experiments show that this approach strongly outperforms alternatives that do not exploit the temporal context. The combination of our contributions improve retrieval accuracy up to 10x over prior state of the art. This strong improvement allows us to introduce a wide range of analyses and applications. For instance, we can condition music retrieval based on visually defined attributes.

Filler Word Detection and Classification: A Dataset and Benchmark

Filler words such as `uh' or `um' are sounds or words people use to signal they are pausing to think. Finding and removing filler words from recordings is a common and tedious task in media editing. Automatically detecting and classifying filler words could greatly aid in this task, but few studies have been published on this problem. A key reason is the absence of a dataset with annotated filler words for training and evaluation. In this work, we present a novel speech dataset, PodcastFillers, with 35K annotated filler words and 50K annotations of other sounds that commonly occur in podcasts such as breaths, laughter, and word repetitions. We propose a pipeline that leverages VAD and ASR to detect filler candidates and a classifier to distinguish between filler word types. We evaluate our proposed pipeline on PodcastFillers, compare to several baselines, and present a detailed ablation study. In particular, we evaluate the importance of using ASR and how it compares to a transcription-free approach resembling keyword spotting. We show that our pipeline obtains state-of-the-art results, and that leveraging ASR strongly outperforms a keyword spotting approach. We make PodcastFillers publicly available, and hope our work serves as a benchmark for future research.

HEAR 2021: Holistic Evaluation of Audio Representations

What audio embedding approach generalizes best to a wide range of downstream tasks across a variety of everyday domains without fine-tuning? The aim of the HEAR 2021 NeurIPS challenge is to develop a general-purpose audio representation that provides a strong basis for learning in a wide variety of tasks and scenarios. HEAR 2021 evaluates audio representations using a benchmark suite across a variety of domains, including speech, environmental sound, and music. In the spirit of shared exchange, each participant submitted an audio embedding model following a common API that is general-purpose, open-source, and freely available to use. Twenty-nine models by thirteen external teams were evaluated on nineteen diverse downstream tasks derived from sixteen datasets. Open evaluation code, submitted models and datasets are key contributions, enabling comprehensive and reproducible evaluation, as well as previously impossible longitudinal studies. It still remains an open question whether one single general-purpose audio representation can perform as holistically as the human ear.