The science and psychology of music performance: creative strategies for teaching and learning

Our goal is to collect a large-scale audio-visual dataset with low label noise from videos ‘in the wild’ using computer vision techniques. The resulting dataset can be used for training and evaluating audio recognition models. We make three contributions. First, we propose a scalable pipeline based on computer vision techniques to create an audio dataset from open-source media. Our pipeline involves obtaining videos from YouTube; using image classification algorithms to localize audio-visual correspondence; and filtering out ambient noise using audio verification. Second, we use this pipeline to curate the VGGSound dataset consisting of more than 200k videos for 300 audio classes. Third, we investigate various Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures and aggregation approaches to establish audio recognition baselines for our new dataset. Compared to existing audio datasets, VGGSound ensures audio-visual correspondence and is collected under unconstrained conditions. Code and the dataset are available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vggsound/.

Vggsound: A Large-Scale Audio-Visual Dataset

Sounds originate from object motions and vibrations of surrounding air. Inspired by the fact that humans is capable of interpreting sound sources from how objects move visually, we propose a novel system that explicitly captures such motion cues for the task of sound localization and separation. Our system is composed of an end-to-end learnable model called Deep Dense Trajectory (DDT), and a curriculum learning scheme. It exploits the inherent coherence of audio-visual signals from a large quantities of unlabeled videos. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that comparing to previous models that rely on visual appearance cues, our motion based system improves performance in separating musical instrument sounds. Furthermore, it separates sound components from duets of the same category of instruments, a challenging problem that has not been addressed before.

The Sound of Motions

Perceiving a scene most fully requires all the senses. Yet modeling how objects look and sound is challenging: most natural scenes and events contain multiple objects, and the audio track mixes all the sound sources together. We propose to learn audio-visual object models from unlabeled video, then exploit the visual context to perform audio source separation in novel videos. Our approach relies on a deep multi-instance multi-label learning framework to disentangle the audio frequency bases that map to individual visual objects, even without observing/hearing those objects in isolation. We show how the recovered disentangled bases can be used to guide audio source separation to obtain better-separated, object-level sounds. Our work is the first to learn audio source separation from large-scale “in the wild” videos containing multiple audio sources per video. We obtain state-of-the-art results on visually-aided audio source separation and audio denoising. Our video results: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/separating_object_sounds/.

/pdf/learning-to-separate-object-sounds-by-watching-unlabeled-3vla02iggj.pdf

Learning to Separate Object Sounds by Watching Unlabeled Video

Recent deep learning approaches have achieved impressive performance on visual sound separation tasks. However, these approaches are mostly built on appearance and optical flow like motion feature representations, which exhibit limited abilities to find the correlations between audio signals and visual points, especially when separating multiple instruments of the same types, such as multiple violins in a scene. To address this, we propose ``Music Gesture," a keypoint-based structured representation to explicitly model the body and finger movements of musicians when they perform music. We first adopt a context-aware graph network to integrate visual semantic context with body dynamics and then apply an audio-visual fusion model to associate body movements with the corresponding audio signals. Experimental results on three music performance datasets show: 1) strong improvements upon benchmark metrics for hetero-musical separation tasks (i.e. different instruments); 2) new ability for effective homo-musical separation for piano, flute, and trumpet duets, which to our best knowledge has never been achieved with alternative methods.

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Music Gesture for Visual Sound Separation

In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of audio-visual event localization in unconstrained videos. We define an audio-visual event as an event that is both visible and audible in a video segment. We collect an Audio-Visual Event (AVE) dataset to systemically investigate three temporal localization tasks: supervised and weakly-supervised audio-visual event localization, and cross-modality localization. We develop an audio-guided visual attention mechanism to explore audio-visual correlations, propose a dual multimodal residual network (DMRN) to fuse information over the two modalities, and introduce an audio-visual distance learning network to handle the cross-modality localization. Our experiments support the following findings: joint modeling of auditory and visual modalities outperforms independent modeling, the learned attention can capture semantics of sounding objects, temporal alignment is important for audio-visual fusion, the proposed DMRN is effective in fusing audio-visual features, and strong correlations between the two modalities enable cross-modality localization.

/pdf/audio-visual-event-localization-in-unconstrained-videos-fb37mwek9s.pdf

Audio-Visual Event Localization in Unconstrained Videos

In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of audio-visual event localization in unconstrained videos. We define an audio-visual event as an event that is both visible and audible in a video segment. We collect an Audio-Visual Event(AVE) dataset to systemically investigate three temporal localization tasks: supervised and weakly-supervised audio-visual event localization, and cross-modality localization. We develop an audio-guided visual attention mechanism to explore audio-visual correlations, propose a dual multimodal residual network (DMRN) to fuse information over the two modalities, and introduce an audio-visual distance learning network to handle the cross-modality localization. Our experiments support the following findings: joint modeling of auditory and visual modalities outperforms independent modeling, the learned attention can capture semantics of sounding objects, temporal alignment is important for audio-visual fusion, the proposed DMRN is effective in fusing audio-visual features, and strong correlations between the two modalities enable cross-modality localization.

We introduce a dataset for facilitating audio-visual analysis of music performances. The dataset comprises 44 simple multi-instrument classical music pieces assembled from coordinated but separately recorded performances of individual tracks. For each piece, we provide the musical score in MIDI format, the audio recordings of the individual tracks, the audio and video recording of the assembled mixture, and ground-truth annotation files including frame-level and note-level transcriptions. We describe our methodology for the creation of the dataset, particularly highlighting our approaches to address the challenges involved in maintaining synchronization and expressiveness. We demonstrate the high quality of synchronization achieved with our proposed approach by comparing the dataset with existing widely used music audio datasets. We anticipate that the dataset will be useful for the development and evaluation of existing music information retrieval (MIR) tasks, as well as for novel multimodal tasks. We benchmark two existing MIR tasks (multipitch analysis and score-informed source separation) on the dataset and compare them with other existing music audio datasets. In addition, we consider two novel multimodal MIR tasks (visually informed multipitch analysis and polyphonic vibrato analysis) enabled by the dataset and provide evaluation measurements and baseline systems for future comparisons (from our recent work). Finally, we propose several emerging research directions that the dataset enables.

Creating a Multitrack Classical Music Performance Dataset for Multimodal Music Analysis: Challenges, Insights, and Applications

We introduce a dataset for facilitating audio-visual analysis of music performances. The dataset comprises 44 simple multi-instrument classical music pieces assembled from coordinated but separately recorded performances of individual tracks. For each piece, we provide the musical score in MIDI format, the audio recordings of the individual tracks, the audio and video recording of the assembled mixture, and ground-truth annotation files including frame-level and note-level transcriptions. We describe our methodology for the creation of the dataset, particularly highlighting our approaches for addressing the challenges involved in maintaining synchronization and expressiveness. We demonstrate the high quality of synchronization achieved with our proposed approach by comparing the dataset with existing widely-used music audio datasets. 
We anticipate that the dataset will be useful for the development and evaluation of existing music information retrieval (MIR) tasks, as well as for novel multi-modal tasks. We benchmark two existing MIR tasks (multi-pitch analysis and score-informed source separation) on the dataset and compare with other existing music audio datasets. Additionally, we consider two novel multi-modal MIR tasks (visually informed multi-pitch analysis and polyphonic vibrato analysis) enabled by the dataset and provide evaluation measures and baseline systems for future comparisons (from our recent work). Finally, we propose several emerging research directions that the dataset enables.

Creating A Multi-track Classical Musical Performance Dataset for Multimodal Music Analysis: Challenges, Insights, and Applications

Automatic music transcription (AMT) is the task of transcribing audio recordings into symbolic representations. Recently, neural network-based methods have been applied to AMT, and have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, many previous systems only detect the onset and offset of notes frame-wise, so the transcription resolution is limited to the frame hop size. There is a lack of research on using different strategies to encode onset and offset targets for training. In addition, previous AMT systems are sensitive to the misaligned onset and offset labels of audio recordings. Furthermore, there are limited researches on sustain pedal transcription on large-scale datasets. In this article, we propose a high-resolution AMT system trained by regressing precise onset and offset times of piano notes. At inference, we propose an algorithm to analytically calculate the precise onset and offset times of piano notes and pedal events. We show that our AMT system is robust to the misaligned onset and offset labels compared to previous systems. Our proposed system achieves an onset F1 of 96.72% on the MAESTRO dataset, outperforming previous onsets and frames system of 94.80%. Our system achieves a pedal onset F1 score of 91.86\%, which is the first benchmark result on the MAESTRO dataset. We have released the source code and checkpoints of our work at this https URL.

Bochen Li

Papers

Audio-Visual Event Localization in Unconstrained Videos

Audio-Visual Event Localization in Unconstrained Videos

Creating a Multitrack Classical Music Performance Dataset for Multimodal Music Analysis: Challenges, Insights, and Applications

Creating A Multi-track Classical Musical Performance Dataset for Multimodal Music Analysis: Challenges, Insights, and Applications

High-resolution Piano Transcription with Pedals by Regressing Onset and Offset Times