Contrastive Learning from Synthetic Audio Doppelgängers

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Cherep, Manuel, Singh, Nikhil
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Cherep, Manuel
Singh, Nikhil
author_facet Cherep, Manuel
Singh, Nikhil
contents Learning robust audio representations currently demands extensive datasets of real-world sound recordings. By applying artificial transformations to these recordings, models can learn to recognize similarities despite subtle variations through techniques like contrastive learning. However, these transformations are only approximations of the true diversity found in real-world sounds, which are generated by complex interactions of physical processes, from vocal cord vibrations to the resonance of musical instruments. We propose a solution to both the data scale and transformation limitations, leveraging synthetic audio. By randomly perturbing the parameters of a sound synthesizer, we generate audio doppelgängers-synthetic positive pairs with causally manipulated variations in timbre, pitch, and temporal envelopes. These variations, difficult to achieve through augmentations of existing audio, provide a rich source of contrastive information. Despite the shift to randomly generated synthetic data, our method produces strong representations, outperforming real data on several standard audio classification tasks. Notably, our approach is lightweight, requires no data storage, and has only a single hyperparameter, which we extensively analyze. We offer this method as a complement to existing strategies for contrastive learning in audio, using synthesized sounds to reduce the data burden on practitioners.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05923
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contrastive Learning from Synthetic Audio Doppelgängers
Cherep, Manuel
Singh, Nikhil
Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
Learning robust audio representations currently demands extensive datasets of real-world sound recordings. By applying artificial transformations to these recordings, models can learn to recognize similarities despite subtle variations through techniques like contrastive learning. However, these transformations are only approximations of the true diversity found in real-world sounds, which are generated by complex interactions of physical processes, from vocal cord vibrations to the resonance of musical instruments. We propose a solution to both the data scale and transformation limitations, leveraging synthetic audio. By randomly perturbing the parameters of a sound synthesizer, we generate audio doppelgängers-synthetic positive pairs with causally manipulated variations in timbre, pitch, and temporal envelopes. These variations, difficult to achieve through augmentations of existing audio, provide a rich source of contrastive information. Despite the shift to randomly generated synthetic data, our method produces strong representations, outperforming real data on several standard audio classification tasks. Notably, our approach is lightweight, requires no data storage, and has only a single hyperparameter, which we extensively analyze. We offer this method as a complement to existing strategies for contrastive learning in audio, using synthesized sounds to reduce the data burden on practitioners.
title Contrastive Learning from Synthetic Audio Doppelgängers
topic Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05923