VisualSoundtrack: An Approach to Style Transfer in the Context of Soundtrack Prototyping

Abstract

© 2017 Ishwarya Ananthabhotla et al. In this work, we present VisualSoundtrack, a system designed as a tool for soundtrack composers to experiment with original musical content in differing musical "styles". The system allows a user to rapidly prototype musical ideas with respect to the target media (such as a film or podcast) by having him/her input original musical motifs, capitalizing on a corpus of existing soundtrack samples to source various styles, and allowing the user to identify the most appropriate style sources for the target media by visually architecting a path through a highly abstracted feature space. The contributions of this paper include the presentation of the novel concept, a description of the fully-functional system design, a focus on the approach taken to achieve the "style transfer", and an initial evaluation of its effectiveness.