Vector-Quantized Timbre Representation

Understand

Timbre is a set of perceptual attributes that identifies different types of sound sources.

• Although its definition is usually elusive, it can be seen from a signal processing viewpoint as all the spectral features that are perceived independently from pitch and loudness.
• Some works have studied high-level timbre synthesis by analyzing the feature relationships of different instruments, but acoustic properties remain entangled and generation bound to individual sounds.
• This paper targets a more flexible synthesis of an individual timbre by learning an approximate decomposition of its spectral properties with a set of generative features.