BigWavGAN: A Wave-To-Wave Generative Adversarial Network for Music Super-Resolution

Generally, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are expected to have high performance when their model size is large. However, large models failed to produce high-quality results commensurate with their scale in music Super-Resolution (SR). We attribute this to that DNNs cannot learn information commensurate with their size from standard mean square error losses. To unleash the potential of large DNN models in music SR, we propose BigWavGAN, which incorporates Demucs, a large-scale wave-to-wave model, with State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) discriminators and adversarial training strategies. Our discriminator consists of Multi-Scale Discriminator (MSD) and Multi-Resolution Discriminator (MRD). During inference, since only the generator is utilized, there are no additional parameters or computational resources required compared to the baseline model Demucs. Objective evaluation affirms the effectiveness of BigWavGAN in music SR. Subjective evaluations indicate that BigWavGAN can generate music with significantly high perceptual quality over the baseline model. Notably, BigWavGAN surpasses the SOTA music SR model in both simulated and real-world scenarios. Moreover, BigWavGAN represents its superior generalization ability to address out-of-distribution data. The conducted ablation study reveals the importance of our discriminators and training strategies. Samples are available on the demo page.

Phase Repair for Time-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks in Music Super-Resolution

Audio Super-Resolution (SR) is an important topic in the field of audio processing. Many models are designed in time domain due to the advantage of waveform processing, such as being able to avoid the phase problem. However, in prior works it is shown that Time-Domain Convolutional Neural Network (TD-CNN) approaches tend to produce annoying artifacts in their output. In order to confirm the source of the artifact, we conduct an AB listening test and found phase to be the cause. We further propose Time-Domain Phase Repair (TD-PR) to improve TD-CNNs' performance by repairing the phase of the TD-CNNs' output. In this paper, we focus on the music SR task, which is challenging due to the wide frequency response and dynamic range of music. Our proposed method can handle various narrow-bandwidth from 2.5kHz to 4kHz with a target bandwidth of 8kHz. We conduct both objective and subjective evaluation to assess the proposed method. The objective evaluation result indicates the proposed method achieves the SR task effectively. Moreover, the proposed TD-PR obtains the much higher mean opinion scores than all TD-CNN baselines, which indicates that the proposed TD-PR significantly improves perceptual quality. Samples are available on the demo page.