[HN Gopher] Pop2Piano: Pop audio-based piano cover generation
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       Pop2Piano: Pop audio-based piano cover generation
        
       Author : modinfo
       Score  : 204 points
       Date   : 2023-01-01 13:08 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sweetcocoa.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sweetcocoa.github.io)
        
       | sampo wrote:
       | The song by Younha in the video (
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SuI6snsbc4#t=1m26s ), doesn't it
       | look like you'd need more than 2 hands to play the piano
       | arrangement?
        
       | DLeychIC wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | dehrmann wrote:
       | I went to watch the video, saw "Seoul National University,"
       | figured that makes sense with how big K-Pop is. Then "Dynamite"
       | came on.
        
       | switchstance wrote:
       | qfl
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | DoingSomeThings wrote:
       | 1. Very cool tool. Awesome work!
       | 
       | 2. How would one go about practicing irl to be able to play in
       | the style of the piano covers?
       | 
       | This is the style of piano I would love to be able to perform. I
       | can read lead sheets and know music theory, but I just don't have
       | the hand chops to perform. Every piano instruction book or
       | tutorial I run across is based on developing progressive skills
       | for classical performance. Pop style playing is distinct and I've
       | never known how to progress my skills.
        
         | minxomat wrote:
         | Piano With Johnny has good contemporary classes, building up
         | improv skills gradually
        
         | atonalfreerider wrote:
         | Please look at PianoVision.app
        
       | ThrowawayTestr wrote:
       | The covers sound really good. I wanna try running it against
       | similar genres of music, see if anything is transferable.
        
       | fumblebee wrote:
       | Unbelievably cool. Great job.
       | 
       | Tangentially -- apologies if this is the wrong thread for this
       | --, I know this is distinct to AI generated music (the melody
       | here is a one-to-one mapping between the input song and output
       | piano), but I'm curious when folks here think when the first
       | totally generated artist will go mainstream with chart hits and
       | millions of "followers". With both an AI generated avatar and AI
       | generated music. And no, not like Gorillaz who simply had fake
       | cartoon personas.
       | 
       | If you believe the argument floating around that content we
       | consume in the future will be hyper individualised to the point
       | music/tv will be generated just for us, then maybe never. IMO
       | that runs counter to shared idolatry that people seem to crave,
       | seems to me just a matter of time.
        
         | zone411 wrote:
         | I think you will see an approach like mine with a heavy use of
         | AI assistants in creating various elements of the songs first
         | (I will compare 10 melodies I've created with an AI assistant I
         | made to human hit melodies: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?li
         | st=PLoCzMRqh5SkFPG0-RIAR8..., https://osf.io/9nd6x). Most
         | existing tools support this approach, and doing a whole song at
         | once does not seem necessary and it would be much less
         | flexible.
        
         | bsenftner wrote:
         | I believe there is a potential market where contemporary
         | celebrity laden media is personalized with automated actor
         | replacement. Fans can have the fantasy of being in the media:
         | in the fantasy, sci-fi, superhero and pop music media they
         | already consume. Side by side with their idols, plus further
         | personalizing treatments such as localization and product
         | placements. This may sound Orwellian, but it is also wildly
         | open ended and a creative uncharted territory for narrative
         | story telling. The potential for education is profound.
         | 
         | I've been working on fully automated actor replacement for over
         | a decade now, exploring the aspects and potential of such
         | personalization. I think it has the potential of being an
         | entire recognized separate medium from traditional story
         | telling.
        
         | probably_wrong wrote:
         | I think the answer is "never", but mostly because the target is
         | both vague and impossibly strict.
         | 
         | Let's take Hatsune Miku. You could argue that "she" fits the
         | bill (3D character, algorithmic voice, lots of followers), but
         | of course there are humans writing those songs and music. If
         | you automated that away (AI lyrics, AI music) you would still
         | have humans checking that the music fits "her" style, that the
         | lyrics make sense, and that the result is not just a racist
         | tirade due to 4chan training data. And as long as those humans
         | are there you can't really say it's 100% AI, can you?
         | 
         | One could argue (wrongly, IMHO) that doing the selection and
         | filtering is not the same as making music, but that criteria
         | would then classify DJs as "not musicians" and I know they hate
         | that.
        
           | ihatepython wrote:
           | Well, DJs are not musicians. They hate it because deep down,
           | they know it's true.
        
           | ordu wrote:
           | _> And as long as those humans are there you can 't really
           | say it's 100% AI, can you?_
           | 
           | I don't know how real artists do things, but I suspect that
           | at least some of them rely on other people opinions about
           | their new piece of work before going public with it.
           | Basically for the same reasons. It is hard to objectively
           | judge your own creative work. Especially because your fans do
           | not judge your works objectively. You need to listen some
           | voice of sanity to not loose your connection with reality.
           | 
           | If it doesn't work as an argument, I can propose a thought
           | experiment. Let's imagine a human artist with a mental
           | disability who sometimes allow himself to do some really
           | strange things. To protect him from big mistakes there is a
           | small group of mentally healthy and competent people to
           | filter his works. The question is: can we say that our
           | disabled artist's works are not his works? Or not 100% his
           | works?
           | 
           |  _> And as long as those humans are there you can 't really
           | say it's 100% AI, can you?_
           | 
           | I believe it depends. How much of filtering those humans do?
        
             | alar44 wrote:
             | That's just not how it works. If anything the opposite is
             | true. Music is full of big egos, ie, this is my band, we do
             | it my way or the highway.
             | 
             | What you're saying might be true for boy bands and pop
             | trash, but actual artists are extremely headstrong.
        
           | recuter wrote:
           | Let a million Mikus bloom unfiltered. The ones that spew out
           | racist tirades or subpar music-noises would presumably be
           | rejected by the consumers (although you never know these
           | days).
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | CWuestefeld wrote:
         | Not until the AI has some degree of agency. So long as it's a
         | human selecting the AI, and pushing the "run" button (and
         | deciding _when_ ) to push the button, that generation machinery
         | is just a tool of the human. Pretty much by definition, to be
         | totally generated, it's got to have the agency to determine
         | what, when, and even if, it should generate.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Would this work on e.g. heavy metal? Or would that be too far
       | outside the network's training set?
        
       | dehrmann wrote:
       | Is there a way to make sure the output is playable? Playing this
       | looks like a bit of a stretch: https://i.imgur.com/pFC7tAr.png
        
       | pimlottc wrote:
       | This is pretty neat, but are they actually playable by a single
       | human pianist? There's parts of the demo video where there are 10
       | simultaneous notes being played over 4 octaves, which doesn't
       | seem humanly possible. Identifying the notes and chords being
       | played is a big step but you've also got to adapt to the
       | limitations of the instrument and figure out how to simplify it
       | to be playable while retaining the same essence. That's a big
       | part of what makes arrangement difficult.
        
         | alar44 wrote:
         | As a piano player, yes.
         | 
         | However, the rhythms and chord selections are extremely weird
         | and no human would ever play this way.
         | 
         | It's a cute toy, but is pretty far from actual piano comping.
         | It doesn't sound human or natural at all.
        
         | cjhanks wrote:
         | I didn't see catch this part, but having 10 notes over 4
         | octaves is not out of the question. If all of those notes are
         | rhythmic, that could be a challenge. All of the fairly wide
         | chords I saw could be played either with sustain or could be
         | easily substituted with spread chords.
         | 
         | Pop pianists don't usually play what's exactly on the page.
        
       | smrtinsert wrote:
       | Does it generate human playable arrangements? I don't even know
       | what that means, but I assume there's some max width fingers can
       | travel or have pressed down at the same time. This is an awesome
       | thing and I can't wait to play with its output in my daws.
       | 
       | This is continued proof to me that the future is art on demand
       | that is instantly created and shared and does not need to be
       | captured in a static form like a youtube video.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Reminds me of:
       | 
       | https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/songsmith-2...
        
       | sigmar wrote:
       | Very cool. Note that it outputs midi and the demo chose to use a
       | terrible piano sound, there's better free samples they could have
       | used. I threw in a flac of the weirdest (read: most nonsensical
       | melody, nowhere close to pop) song I could think of (Mupp -
       | vendetta) into the collab and it seemed to do pretty well
       | capturing the melody. Composer 1 lost some of the nuance of the
       | melody at 0:50, but composer 14 got much closer.
        
       | Rochus wrote:
       | That's amazing, congrats to the authors. Wonder how it would
       | perform on harmonically more complex pop songs (e.g.
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8).
        
         | 082349872349872 wrote:
         | Having been strongly influenced by Marx & Cannel _How to Play
         | the Piano Despite Years of Lessons_ , I suspect there's a much
         | simpler harmony that would also back the melody.
         | 
         | (that said, IIUC what pop2piano does, it's style transfer for
         | arrangements -- so my prediction is it would track the complex
         | harmony, with appropriate realisations of each chord?)
         | 
         | [Edit: > _Pop2Piano uses only four-beat length audio for the
         | context of input. Therefore, features such as melody contour or
         | tex- ture of accompaniment have less consistency when
         | generating longer than four-beat. Also, time quantization based
         | on eighth note beats prevents the model from generating piano
         | covers with other rhythms such as triplets, 16th notes, and
         | trills._
         | 
         | So, yeah, with that window it ought to track...
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.00895.pdf ]
        
       | vikbez wrote:
       | Well I recently home-made a player piano [1] this will be perfect
       | for it :D Thanks !
       | 
       | [1] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atJ_YsPFDjQ
        
         | yetanotherloser wrote:
         | Very nice work! How does it (does it at all?) control how hard
         | it hits from one note to the next? What does the striking -
         | solenoids?
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | squarefoot wrote:
           | Yes, it uses solenoid based actuators. Not sure if it
           | controls the dynamics too, but one way to do that would be by
           | driving the actuators using a curve modulated by high
           | frequency PWM; probably quite hard to calibrate to MIDI key
           | velocity since those actuators are essentially on/off
           | devices, but doable.
           | 
           | A very nice project, I'd love to see some more information
           | about it.
        
             | vikbez wrote:
             | WIP code but I added infos here:
             | https://github.com/vikbez/PlayerPianoController/
        
               | yetanotherloser wrote:
               | Thanks! So - midi velocity translates to PWM and hence
               | solenoid force? Cool. You can always add some kind of
               | mapping function if lower velocities are too low force.
               | Nice work.
               | 
               | (old pre-electronics player pianos could do dynamics but
               | most relied heavily on input from the operator to do so -
               | with various limitations - it's probably a good plan to
               | avoid directly imitating them :-)
        
         | hammock wrote:
         | Very cool - do you have a write up?
        
         | tboerstad wrote:
         | Magic!
        
       | agolio wrote:
       | Cool - but there is no proof that these demo songs are out-of-
       | sample, and the trained model does not seem to be available in
       | the github.
       | 
       | If I am understanding correctly, the github code doesn't contain
       | the code to train the model? [1]
       | 
       | The paper also doesn't seem to be peer-reviewed? (I guess it is
       | pre-review, since it is on arxiv only 2m ago)
       | 
       | No disrespect to the authors - looks like a really cool project -
       | I am just a bit suspicious without seeing any performance on
       | user-submitted data.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/sweetcocoa/pop2piano/issues/3
        
         | TaupeRanger wrote:
         | Nearly 100% certainty these are cherry picked. Almost all
         | "music generation" approaches are, which is a canary in the
         | coal mine. Good music gen is much harder than most non-musical
         | AI researchers assume.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | bumby wrote:
       | Is it possible to have the output in traditional sight-reading
       | notation?
        
         | ls15 wrote:
         | There is notation software that can import MIDI, such as
         | Musescore or Lilypond (both free)
        
       | fassssst wrote:
       | Oooo it outputs midi. Time to fire up Ableton and make use of
       | Keyscape and all my VST's. Thanks!
        
         | ligerzer0 wrote:
         | How do you get the midi ?
        
       | dehrmann wrote:
       | Sk8er Boi is an impressive song to demo. The chorus is in a
       | different key than the verse, and one of the verse chords is out-
       | of-key, borrowed from the chorus.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-01 23:00 UTC)