Vapar Synth - A Variational Parametric Model for Audio Synthesis

Published: 2020, Last Modified: 23 Mar 2026ICASSP 2020EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: With the advent of data-driven statistical modeling and abundant computing power, researchers are turning increasingly to deep learning for audio synthesis. These methods try to model audio signals directly in the time or frequency domain. In the interest of more flexible control over the generated sound, it could be more useful to work with a parametric representation of the signal which corresponds more directly to the musical attributes such as pitch, dynamics and timbre. We present Va-Par Synth - a Variational Parametric Synthesizer which utilizes a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) trained on a suitable parametric representation. We demonstrate1 our proposed model's capabilities via the reconstruction and generation of instrumental tones with flexible control over their pitch.
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