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Posted by zhinit 5 hours ago

How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM(www.zhinit.dev)
70 points | 46 comments
thangalin 1 hour ago|
Slightly off-topic. Now that 1920s jazz music is falling into public domain, has anyone tried to reinvigorate the music using AI and generative adversarial approaches? Pre-1940s music didn't have high-fidelity sound, so the strong bass lines weren't captured. In theory, we could "downgrade" modern recordings to sound like 1920s recordings, then use adversarial techniques to train the machine on how to restore the antique recordings. Anyone know of any work being done in this area?
gregdaniels421 27 minutes ago||
So the idea would be to reconstruct the low frequency components from whatever upper harmonics are left in the recording? If you know the instruments and positioning of the recording device and something of its(the instruments, recorder, environment, etc.) characteristics, it might be possible to solve that using classic methods. There would be huge numbers of parameters, it is an interesting thought. Is there a large easily/freely available corpus of those recordings?
zhinit 25 minutes ago||
To do this, I think you are right that you would need to 'downgrade' modern recordings to sound old so that you have both sides of the training data covered.

This would be a cool project to work on. Ideally you would buy some vintage gear and then run the audio through both, but that would be very expensive. You could may be find some vst emulations though and get decent results.

larme 3 hours ago||
People who are interested in this application should check synplant[0]. It has a ML technology called "Genopatch" which gives you 2 functionality:

1. you can try to describe a sound with some tags and it will try to generate a sound to capture the feeling of these tags

2.you can feed it with a sound sample and it will try to re-synthesize the sound with its synth engine. Though the end result will usually be just a "re-imagined" version of your input sample.

My guess is the underlying model is not a "deep" model. The main benefit is that the end result is not a wave file, but a list of generated parameters that can be synthesized by the synthplant engine. And now it comes the interesting part: you can tweak these parameters to finetune the generated sound. These parameters have actual meanings (FM ratio, reverb etc.)

[0]: https://soniccharge.com/synplant

aw123 2 hours ago||
How far are we from getting a general model that can resynthesize any instrumental audio sound without fiddling with any knobs, so that we can recreate instruments we hear from any song? Seems like it should exist by now?
larme 1 hour ago|||
For me creating the exact sound is not very interesting from sound designing perspective. You can always sample the real instrument.

Like physical modeling synthesis, the interesting part is to compress the sound to some parameters that you can tweak and generate new sounds

Another approach is VAE, which also you give your some latent embedding, you can tweak the embedding to generate new sound. However the meaning of this embedding is not explicit.

lightedman 1 hour ago||
"You can always sample the real instrument."

This doesn't really work on instruments like guitars. Open D sounds way different than fretted D on the E string. Timbre changes with position and it's one of the ways I determine where a player's hands are on the neck when I'm trying to play their song.

beepbooptheory 1 hour ago||
I'm not doing fancy AI stuff but I have worked a lot with my own bespoke supercollider system where I record whole fretboards of guitars and then play alternative notes based off of certain rules. For whatever dumb reason though, the most natural sounding thing is really just playing, e.g., any random D4 from its possibilities at any given moment.

Timbral differences also exist depending on force, the manner plucked, the already ringing overtones... It's hard to know what you want, but the most natural thing is always going to be some organic variation in the notes in general.

If you have a good ear, you aren't, I don't think, hearing so much the timbral diff in the individual open or fretted notes as much as the fact that a barre chord and an open chord is a different voicing of the same harmony.

zhinit 2 hours ago|||
SUNO is pretty close. It still has some weird things going on with high frequency artifacts and phase between left and right channels but if you aren't listening on a good system (like a phone) most people probably wont notice.
zhinit 2 hours ago||
synplant is a great synth!
robotswantdata 1 hour ago||
Confused. Why not just make the kick drum from a sine? Seconds
zhinit 36 minutes ago||
I sound design a lot of stuff (in fact I made some of the default kicks in the app), but this is just a different tool, and I wanted some practice training and deploying a generative AI model.
lilbigdoot 19 minutes ago||
A sine is only a part of most kicks
tunk 1 hour ago||
This has been done years ago. See https://audialab.com/products/emergent-drums-2/ for instance.
zhinit 30 minutes ago|
Interesting! I had not seen this. On their website they mention diffusion but not the other models so it might not be identical but its definitely similar.
johndear223 3 hours ago||
Articles like this are why I come back to HN. Interesting technically, kinda novel and fun. Got me thinking about datasets that may be sitting on old HDD, got TBs of old video and audio from projects of past. Blogs like this help point the way.. Now if only I had the time..
alex7o 3 hours ago||
If you know what you want to achieve you can asks claude/codex/glm whatever, to do the proof of concept first and Dave some time like that
zhinit 2 hours ago||
Thanks!
dj_axl 3 hours ago||
Modeled reverb yet no modeled compressor, hrmm, is compression not used on kick drums (or not a big part of the sound)?
zhinit 3 hours ago|
The compression is the OTT which stands for Over The Top compression. It was originally a multiband compressor preset in ableton and is now used widely throughout dance music.
fabiofzero 23 minutes ago||
You could save so much time and processing power by just learning how to sidechain.
pringk02 4 hours ago||
I just wish it had samples! I want to hear it
zhinit 4 hours ago|
For sure! I just added a couple
andai 1 hour ago|||
Did you save any of the "failed" results? I'd love to hear what kind of weird sounds it makes out of distribution (e.g. on the keywords it didn't have much data for).
motoxpro 4 hours ago||||
They sound cool! Add a few more! :P
jdalgetty 3 hours ago||
I was hoping to hear some songs using these samples!
scoot 1 hour ago|||
Not sure if there's something wrong with the player, or if it's just me, but they both sound like noise. I guess the first sounds vaguely kick drum-like (but distorted), the second is just noise.

Chrome 149.0.7827.200 (Official Build) (arm64), macOS Tahoe 26.0.1

trencedamp 2 hours ago||
For a moment I thought Gen AI meant the current generation of kids. It's a fitting moniker
juancn 3 hours ago|
Excellent article! I think it has the right level of detail, one question though: why the shape of the tensor? 4x8x11.

That I didn't get from the text.

zhinit 3 hours ago|
the spectrograms are 128x173 (128 mel frequency bins by 173 time frames) the encoder is downsampling 4 stages of stride 2 convolutions so it halves dimensions 4 times

0: 128 x 173

1: 64 x 87

2: 32 x 44

3: 16 x 22

4: 8 x 11

Then i used 4 separate channels.

This was somewhat arbitrary due to the local training constraint. This would be a hyper parameter worth tuning if I had time to dig into this more.

I trained this a few month ago and don't remember exactly what I tried before I arrived here, but I only ran the whole process 2 or 3 times because of how long it took to train. Hope this answers your question!

juancn 3 hours ago||
Yeah, thanks!!
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