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Bach to the Future – Humanising Music with Neural Nets (2019)
- fxtentacle 4y agoTLDR: They use a small LSTM model to predict the velocity and delay that a human player might have for each piano keypress based on the MIDI notes.
- tgv 4y agoUnfortunately, that makes you lose the style. It's an enjoyable read, if a bit long, but it's easy to skim the details. For those wondering about other musical signatures: Shostakovich signed with D Es C H (Dmitri SCHostakowitsch, the German transcription of his name).
- chank 4y ago> Bach to the Future – Humanising Music with Neural Nets Poor taste in title, IMO.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoDo you really need or want a NN for this? Wouldn't it be better to parametrize the agility of the various fingers, wrist and arms and then use a deterministic algorithm with a sprinkle of randomness to calculate how delayed the various notes are? This way you could even simulate someone getting tired throughout the performance!
- rch 4y agoMaybe with reservoir computing methods?
- PeterisP 4y agoThat would work iff the velocity and timing would be determined by the agility of the various fingers, wrist and arms; however, those only specify the limits of the possible and the actual velocity and timing largely represent the pianist's musical interpretation of the piece, and we don't know of a good deterministic algorithm for that - the best we can do is to analyze a large quantity of music (e.g. by a NN) to determine what that algorithm should be.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoBut musical interpretation is something you develop from your education and your lived experiences. It is meaningless to agglomerate the interpretations of thousands of pianists from an artistic perspective. If you want to simulate human physical limits then model the muscle agility, not the interpretation
- PeterisP 4y agoThere is no intent to simulate human physical limits, the goal of "Humanization" of MIDI music or musical notation is to provide an output that sounds "better" and more "human-like" than the default (very bad sounding) option of playing the notes at the exact timing and velocity that only follows the explicit notation (e.g. forte or crescendo) and is otherwise uniform. Attempts to agglomerate the interpretations of thousands of pianists from an artistic perspective can be used to provide a better-sounding outcome than pure random variation (the simplest 'humanizer' algorithms in various tools) or a deterministic algorithm with hand-crafted heuristics, so they are useful and meaningful because of that.
- onemoresoop 4y agoBut why strive to humanize something mechanical? Why pretend it's as if a human played it? Why exclude rather than plug in some human in the form of collaboration? I'm a bit dismayed with the current direction, tools are no longer developed for humans to use but for humans to be excluded. I hope it's a temporary direction because if this becomes a general trend in the future it will be depressing for humanity. Many more things will seek to be 'humanized' while actual humans will be few and far between
- 2devnull 4y agoCoolest thing I’ve read this year, acknowledging it’s from a few years back. A number of interesting lessons, in terms of both machine learning and music. I hope we don’t replace human performers, even if and when we can. Live performance rather than recordings needs to be prioritized by listeners. And acoustic, non-autotuned only!