Constrained Example-Based Audio Synthesis

Music and sound play an important role for the emotional involvement of the spectator in visual media such as movies, video games or artistic shows. However, the generation of suitable background music and atmospheric sound matching the visual context is a tedious and typically completely manual task. For content creators, it would be desirable to be able to specify a sound example and a few key points at which certain parts are to be played, and to then automatically generate a soundtrack subject to these constraints. For interactive media such as video games, on the other hand, example-based background sound could automatically adapt to the game events. We propose a new example-based audio synthesis method for both applications which works for musical and texture-like sound examples alike. Our algorithm is evaluated on a variety of musical styles, from classical music to punk rock, and on several texture-like atmospheric sounds.