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Main Authors: Burred, Juan José, Cella, Carmine-Emanuele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08816
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author Burred, Juan José
Cella, Carmine-Emanuele
author_facet Burred, Juan José
Cella, Carmine-Emanuele
contents We propose the use of Non-Negative Autoencoders (NAEs) for sound deconstruction and user-guided manipulation of sounds for creative purposes. NAEs offer a versatile and scalable extension of traditional Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF)-based approaches for interpretable audio decomposition. By enforcing non-negativity constraints through projected gradient descent, we obtain decompositions where internal weights and activations can be directly interpreted as spectral shapes and temporal envelopes, and where components can themselves be listened to as individual sound events. In particular, multi-layer Deep NAE architectures enable hierarchical representations with an adjustable level of granularity, allowing sounds to be deconstructed at multiple levels of abstraction: from high-level note envelopes down to fine-grained spectral details. This framework enables a wide new range of expressive, controllable, and randomized sound transformations. We introduce novel manipulation operations including cross-component and cross-layer synthesis, hierarchical deconstructions, and several randomization strategies that control timbre and event density. Through visualizations and resynthesis of practical examples, we demonstrate how NAEs can serve as flexible and interpretable tools for object-based sound editing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_08816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Audible Networks: Deconstructing and Manipulating Sounds with Deep Non-Negative Autoencoders
Burred, Juan José
Cella, Carmine-Emanuele
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
We propose the use of Non-Negative Autoencoders (NAEs) for sound deconstruction and user-guided manipulation of sounds for creative purposes. NAEs offer a versatile and scalable extension of traditional Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF)-based approaches for interpretable audio decomposition. By enforcing non-negativity constraints through projected gradient descent, we obtain decompositions where internal weights and activations can be directly interpreted as spectral shapes and temporal envelopes, and where components can themselves be listened to as individual sound events. In particular, multi-layer Deep NAE architectures enable hierarchical representations with an adjustable level of granularity, allowing sounds to be deconstructed at multiple levels of abstraction: from high-level note envelopes down to fine-grained spectral details. This framework enables a wide new range of expressive, controllable, and randomized sound transformations. We introduce novel manipulation operations including cross-component and cross-layer synthesis, hierarchical deconstructions, and several randomization strategies that control timbre and event density. Through visualizations and resynthesis of practical examples, we demonstrate how NAEs can serve as flexible and interpretable tools for object-based sound editing.
title Audible Networks: Deconstructing and Manipulating Sounds with Deep Non-Negative Autoencoders
topic Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08816