Led by the success of neural style transfer on visual arts, there has been a rising trend very recently in the effort of music style transfer. However, "music style" is not yet a well-defined concept from a scientific point of view. The difficulty lies in the intrinsic multi-level and multi-modal character of music representation (which is very different from image representation). As a result, depending on their interpretation of "music style", current studies under the category of "music style transfer", are actually solving completely different problems that belong to a variety of sub-fields of Computer Music. Also, a vanilla end-to-end approach, which aims at dealing with all levels of music representation at once by directly adopting the method of image style transfer, leads to poor results. Thus, we see a vital necessity to re-define music style transfer more precisely and scientifically based on the uniqueness of music representation, as well as to connect different aspects of music style transfer with existing well-established sub-fields of computer music studies. Otherwise, an accumulated upcoming literature (all named after music style transfer) will lead to a great confusion of the underlying problems as well as negligence of the treasures in computer music before the age of deep learning. In addition, we discuss the current limitations of music style modeling and its future directions by drawing spirit from some deep generative models, especially the ones using unsupervised learning and disentanglement techniques.
A successful timbre style transfer would allow us to reproduce a trumpet performance by a flute with the same musical expression. Timbre style transfer is closely related to sound synthesis @cite_26 , especially the studies aiming to synthesize different sound of acoustic instruments. The difference is that timbre style transfer requires a disentanglement of timbre (style) and performance control (content) and implies that there is room to create new timbre through the combination of different ones.
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From the Publisher Sound Synthesis and Sampling is all about the principles of electronic musical instruments. It provides a comprehensive introduction to all the most common forms of analog and digital sound synthesis, as well as covering many of the less commonly encountered techniques used in research and academia. Written in an almost entirely non-mathematical fashion, and extensively illustrated with clear diagrams, this book will make an ideal reference for students of music technology, audio engineering and acoustics, as well as for enthusiasts, musicians, engineers and multimedia specialists. Questions are provided at the ends of chapters for revision purposes, and a substantial glossary explains a wide range of related terms. Time-lines show key events in the history of synthesis and examples are given of commercial products that employ the technology described.