A Multimodal Symphony: Integrating Taste and Sound through Generative AI

In recent decades, neuroscientific and psychological research has traced direct relationships between taste and auditory perceptions. This article explores multimodal generative models capable of converting taste information into music, building on this foundational research. We provide a brief review of the state of the art in this field, highlighting key findings and methodologies. We present an experiment in which a fine-tuned version of a generative music model (MusicGEN) is used to generate music based on detailed taste descriptions provided for each musical piece. The results are promising: according the participants' ($n=111$) evaluation, the fine-tuned model produces music that more coherently reflects the input taste descriptions compared to the non-fine-tuned model. This study represents a significant step towards understanding and developing embodied interactions between AI, sound, and taste, opening new possibilities in the field of generative AI. We release our dataset, code and pre-trained model at: https://osf.io/xs5jy/.

Accompaniment Prompt Adherence: A Measure for Evaluating Music Accompaniment Systems

Generative systems of musical accompaniments are rapidly growing, yet there are no standardized metrics to evaluate how well generations align with the conditional audio prompt. We introduce a distribution-based measure called "Accompaniment Prompt Adherence" (APA), and validate it through objective experiments on synthetic data perturbations, and human listening tests. Results show that APA aligns well with human judgments of adherence and is discriminative to transformations that degrade adherence. We release a Python implementation of the metric using the widely adopted pre-trained CLAP embedding model, offering a valuable tool for evaluating and comparing accompaniment generation systems.

Video Motion Graphs

We present Video Motion Graphs, a system designed to generate realistic human motion videos. Using a reference video and conditional signals such as music or motion tags, the system synthesizes new videos by first retrieving video clips with gestures matching the conditions and then generating interpolation frames to seamlessly connect clip boundaries. The core of our approach is HMInterp, a robust Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) model that enables seamless interpolation of discontinuous frames, even for complex motion scenarios like dancing. HMInterp i) employs a dual-branch interpolation approach, combining a Motion Diffusion Model for human skeleton motion interpolation with a diffusion-based video frame interpolation model for final frame generation. ii) adopts condition progressive training to effectively leverage identity strong and weak conditions, such as images and pose. These designs ensure both high video texture quality and accurate motion trajectory. Results show that our Video Motion Graphs outperforms existing generative- and retrieval-based methods for multi-modal conditioned human motion video generation. Project page can be found at https://h-liu1997.github.io/Video-Motion-Graphs/

A Comprehensive Survey on Generative AI for Video-to-Music Generation

The burgeoning growth of video-to-music generation can be attributed to the ascendancy of multimodal generative models. However, there is a lack of literature that comprehensively combs through the work in this field. To fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive review of video-to-music generation using deep generative AI techniques, focusing on three key components: visual feature extraction, music generation frameworks, and conditioning mechanisms. We categorize existing approaches based on their designs for each component, clarifying the roles of different strategies. Preceding this, we provide a fine-grained classification of video and music modalities, illustrating how different categories influence the design of components within the generation pipelines. Furthermore, we summarize available multimodal datasets and evaluation metrics while highlighting ongoing challenges in the field.

Réduire le bruit grâce à la réalité augmentée sonore -- Auditory Concealer

This report presents the work done over 22 weeks of internship within the Sound Perception and Design team of the Sciences and Technologies of Music and Sound (STMS) laboratory at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM). As part of the launch of the project Reducing Noise with Augmented Reality (ReNAR); which aims to create a tool to reduce in real-time the cognitive impact of sounds perceived as unpleasant or annoying in indoor environments; an initial study was conducted to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of a new masking approach called concealer. The main hypothesis is that the concealer approach could provide better results than a masker approach in terms of perceived pleasantness. Mixtures of two noise sources (ventilation) and five masking sounds (water sounds) were generated using both approaches at various levels. The evaluation of the perceived pleasantness of these mixtures showed that the masker approach remains more effective than the concealer approach, regardless of the noise source, water sound, or level used.

Unsupervised Estimation of Nonlinear Audio Effects: Comparing Diffusion-Based and Adversarial approaches

Accurately estimating nonlinear audio effects without access to paired input-output signals remains a challenging problem.This work studies unsupervised probabilistic approaches for solving this task. We introduce a method, novel for this application, based on diffusion generative models for blind system identification, enabling the estimation of unknown nonlinear effects using black- and gray-box models. This study compares this method with a previously proposed adversarial approach, analyzing the performance of both methods under different parameterizations of the effect operator and varying lengths of available effected recordings.Through experiments on guitar distortion effects, we show that the diffusion-based approach provides more stable results and is less sensitive to data availability, while the adversarial approach is superior at estimating more pronounced distortion effects. Our findings contribute to the robust unsupervised blind estimation of audio effects, demonstrating the potential of diffusion models for system identification in music technology.

DiffRhythm: Blazingly Fast and Embarrassingly Simple End-to-End Full-Length Song Generation with Latent Diffusion

Recent advancements in music generation have garnered significant attention, yet existing approaches face critical limitations. Some current generative models can only synthesize either the vocal track or the accompaniment track. While some models can generate combined vocal and accompaniment, they typically rely on meticulously designed multi-stage cascading architectures and intricate data pipelines, hindering scalability. Additionally, most systems are restricted to generating short musical segments rather than full-length songs. Furthermore, widely used language model-based methods suffer from slow inference speeds. To address these challenges, we propose DiffRhythm, the first latent diffusion-based song generation model capable of synthesizing complete songs with both vocal and accompaniment for durations of up to 4m45s in only ten seconds, maintaining high musicality and intelligibility. Despite its remarkable capabilities, DiffRhythm is designed to be simple and elegant: it eliminates the need for complex data preparation, employs a straightforward model structure, and requires only lyrics and a style prompt during inference. Additionally, its non-autoregressive structure ensures fast inference speeds. This simplicity guarantees the scalability of DiffRhythm. Moreover, we release the complete training code along with the pre-trained model on large-scale data to promote reproducibility and further research.

GCDance: Genre-Controlled 3D Full Body Dance Generation Driven By Music

Generating high-quality full-body dance sequences from music is a challenging task as it requires strict adherence to genre-specific choreography. Moreover, the generated sequences must be both physically realistic and precisely synchronized with the beats and rhythm of the music. To overcome these challenges, we propose GCDance, a classifier-free diffusion framework for generating genre-specific dance motions conditioned on both music and textual prompts. Specifically, our approach extracts music features by combining high-level pre-trained music foundation model features with hand-crafted features for multi-granularity feature fusion. To achieve genre controllability, we leverage CLIP to efficiently embed genre-based textual prompt representations at each time step within our dance generation pipeline. Our GCDance framework can generate diverse dance styles from the same piece of music while ensuring coherence with the rhythm and melody of the music. Extensive experimental results obtained on the FineDance dataset demonstrate that GCDance significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches, which also achieve competitive results on the AIST++ dataset. Our ablation and inference time analysis demonstrate that GCDance provides an effective solution for high-quality music-driven dance generation.

DGFM: Full Body Dance Generation Driven by Music Foundation Models

In music-driven dance motion generation, most existing methods use hand-crafted features and neglect that music foundation models have profoundly impacted cross-modal content generation. To bridge this gap, we propose a diffusion-based method that generates dance movements conditioned on text and music. Our approach extracts music features by combining high-level features obtained by music foundation model with hand-crafted features, thereby enhancing the quality of generated dance sequences. This method effectively leverages the advantages of high-level semantic information and low-level temporal details to improve the model's capability in music feature understanding. To show the merits of the proposed method, we compare it with four music foundation models and two sets of hand-crafted music features. The results demonstrate that our method obtains the most realistic dance sequences and achieves the best match with the input music.

Music-Driven Legged Robots: Synchronized Walking to Rhythmic Beats

We address the challenge of effectively controlling the locomotion of legged robots by incorporating precise frequency and phase characteristics, which is often ignored in locomotion policies that do not account for the periodic nature of walking. We propose a hierarchical architecture that integrates a low-level phase tracker, oscillators, and a high-level phase modulator. This controller allows quadruped robots to walk in a natural manner that is synchronized with external musical rhythms. Our method generates diverse gaits across different frequencies and achieves real-time synchronization with music in the physical world. This research establishes a foundational framework for enabling real-time execution of accurate rhythmic motions in legged robots. Video is available at website: https://music-walker.github.io/.