Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum 2023


Politecnico di Torino
Torino, Italy
September 11 - 15, 2023





Session: A07-03: Acoustical, perceptual and neural modelling of drums
Date: Tuesday 12 September 2023
Time: 17:00 - 17:20
Title: Differentiable Modelling of Percussive Audio with Transient and Spectral Synthesis
Author(s): J. Shier, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Rd, Bethnal Green, E1 4NS London, UK
F. Caspe, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Rd, Bethnal Green, E1 4NS London, UK
A. Robertson, Ableton AG, Schönhauser Allee 6-7, 10119 Berlin, Germany
M. Sandler, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Rd, Bethnal Green, E1 4NS London, UK
C. Saitis, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Rd, Bethnal Green, E1 4NS London, UK
A. McPherson, Imperial College, Imperial College Road, SW7 2DB London, UK
Pages: 2225-2232
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2023.1093
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2023/data/articles/001093.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

Differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) techniques, including methods for audio synthesis, have gained attention in recent years and lend themselves to interpretability in the parameter space. However, current differentiable synthesis methods have not explicitly sought to model the transient portion of signals, which is important for percussive sounds. In this work, we present a unified synthesis framework aiming to address transient generation and percussive synthesis within a DDSP framework. To this end, we propose a model for percussive synthesis that builds on sinusoidal modeling synthesis and incorporates a modulated temporal convolutional network for transient generation. We use a modified sinusoidal peak picking algorithm to generate time-varying non-harmonic sinusoids and pair it with differentiable noise and transient encoders that are jointly trained to reconstruct drumset sounds. We compute a set of reconstruction metrics using a large dataset of acoustic and electronic percussion samples that show that our method leads to improved onset signal reconstruction for membranophone percussion instruments.