Visualizing Music with GANs

https://twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1188785427295195136

by who-knows • 7 years ago

249 32 7 years ago

Amazing, how to make this happen?

FpUser3• 7 years ago

This may be GANs as the author stated but the end result looks surprisingly similar to a bunch of pixel shaders making transitions between source and target images with said transitions driven either by pure algorithms and/or derived from blurred images themselves.

I've implemented music visualizer ages ago using similar concepts (pure algos though, no real images). It happened when nVidia released the first affordable consumer video card with decent shader support. I think it was 6600GT . My animation part that made video dance to music was a bit more sophisticated though.

sillysaurusx2• 7 years ago

Cool! How'd you make your video dance to a beat? Is the code available anywhere?

@jonathanfly has been posting some interesting machine learning effects: https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1185843103271444480

I guess one way to make these effects dance to music would be to make a Mel spectrogram of the audio, then somehow use the shapes in the spectrogram to apply deltas to the rendered frames.

pierrec• 7 years ago

Regarding the music synchronization, OK, this is ancient stuff.

However, in terms of graphics, this strikes me as different from anything that was possible before the recent advances in GANs. During the era you're talking about, the art of shader-based music visualizers was being pushed by projects like Milkdrop 2, and nowadays a lot of similar research still happens on Shadertoy, and the demoscene, of course, hasn't stopped blowing people's minds.

But this is on another level entirely. It's as is the content and seemingly human concepts themselves are being smoothly animated.

alexcnwy2• 7 years ago

GANs + "A ton of python magic" [1] :)

[1] https://twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1188798045158293505

carlbarrdahl• 7 years ago

beautiful! I enjoy how the morphs surprises me, making them hard to predict.

sladix• 7 years ago

Amazing work ! Congrats !

BasDirks• 7 years ago

Insanely cool. Also see this work by the same author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6du033n-J3s

sillysaurusx2• 7 years ago

GANs are an interesting frontier. Videos are much more engaging than photos. The next logical step is to make a real-time GAN, like a videogame you can walk around in.

Imagine using a Vive to explore a GAN interactively. You'd be able to control the GAN using vive controllers and by walking around your room.

Right now it takes 163ms to render a 1024x1024 frame on a K80 GPU. That's 6 FPS, which is within an order of magnitude of 60FPS.

I haven't timed a 256x256 GAN, but presumably it would be 16x faster to generate. If so, then you'd be able to achieve 98FPS.

The above timings are based on the 1024x1024 FFHQ GAN model, which generates portraits of humans. https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan-encoder

And indeed, it looks like the author uploaded an FFHQ music video 14 minutes ago! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TLEfOMBbMw It looks cool.

Someone should train a 256x256 FFHQ and make a 90FPS interactive renderer for it.

Unfortunately it's not possible to take a large GAN like 1024x1024 FFHQ and only generate a 256x256 image. Each GAN is trained for a specific size, so you're stuck with 6 FPS at 1024x1024. I wish the FFHQ authors had saved a 256x256 checkpoint during training.

Training a 256x256 GAN from scratch costs somewhere in the range of $150 GCE credits. But you might be able to bootstrap a 256x256 FFHQ using the weights from the 1024x1024 FFHQ (aka transfer learning). That might train a lot faster.

There is also the recent NoGAN technique, which skips progressive growing by pretraining the generator: https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify/#what-is-nogan Supposedly it speeds up GAN training by a huge amount.

alexcnwy2• 7 years ago

This is so incredible and well executed. It's crazy to see how quickly GANs are moving (e.g. check out this tweet [1] by Ian Goodfellow on 4.5 years of GAN progress) ... excited to see what they can do a few years from now!

[1] https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/108497359623614464...

reikonomusha• 7 years ago

I had trouble connecting the music to the transitions and morphs. I perceived it just as music overlaid on fun-to-see GAN-generated images, though clearly that’s not the aim. The music is beautiful and the imagery is intriguing, however.

McIceT4• 7 years ago

This is something I've been working on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52qWiLoOeIQ you should clearly see the connection between the morphs and the music

jressey• 7 years ago

I'm blown away.

So the glasses are always present when the bass/808s are hitting, so is there something that maps the sound to the images?

What is it about the algorithms that make the images 'dance' so quickly between the 3.5 beat and the 1? Is it because there are static risers that move so quickly through the wave spectrum?

Wait... is light skin mapped to when highs dominate and dark skin to lows?

jcims2• 7 years ago

For some reason this made me yearn for a GAN that generates motorcycles riding through landscapes. Love the storytelling potential of your work, great stuff!

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

Absolutely. Amazing. I was waiting for someone to try this, and you did, and the results are way more impressive than I imagined they would be.

(Try this with different kinds of songs if you can!)

guelo2• 7 years ago

I don't really get what the connection to the music is supposed to be either. Does the music influence the GAN somehow?

craze3• 7 years ago

You may notice that the visual changes occur at the same frequency as the music's tempo. But you're right, there is no influence on the content itself.

dpau• 7 years ago

yeah i when i read the title i was hoping the GAN visualizations would reveal the underlying structure of the music somehow, or the images would have a more compelling link to the music. EDIT: just realized it might be much more interesting to train GANs with movie soundtracks, thus forming a link between music and image

autokad• 7 years ago

Is there shareable / repeatable code to go behind it? Its cool but without seeing how it was produced, it could be just as well a fancy output of a video editing software

captn3m0• 7 years ago

So who’s converting this to Milkdrop?

manuaero• 7 years ago

this is nice. Great choice of track too! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=137&v=K-AmcJhqV7...

RootReducer• 7 years ago

This is a totally different way of visualizing a track - no GAN here, all done by hand, but also very cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvEGgMbTW1s

Visualizing Music with GANs

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