ScreamNet

This project aims at creating an AI system, based on a GAN neural network, capable of transforming vocal audio inputs by applying a screaming effect that turns voices (whether they come from songs, speeches or even whispers) into realistic screams and growls, to the delight of metal lovers 🤘🎵.
This allows, for example, to reinterpret songs by generating an original screaming counterpart, or to experiment with personal recordings to produce metal-like vocals.

How it works

The implementation (built on top of tensorflow) is based on the MelGAN architecture ¹, which has been revised in a couple of points that will be briefly discussed:

1. Differently from the original paper, whose goal is to produce a raw waveform starting from a mel-spectrogram (output of another neural model) for a Text-To-Speech task, the designed model takes a raw waveform in input. Nonetheless, it is immediately transformed into the corresponding mel-spectrogram also in this case: this happens inside of the network, which is an end-to-end model, that also handles preprocessing operations such as the normalization, without directly relying on external libraries like librosa, making the model completely independent and portable (see the "App" section below). Similarly to the real MelGAN, this input is made up of 1 second of audio, processed at 22050Hz.

2. The hinge loss has been preserved, as well as the general structure (including the use of three different discriminators operating at different levels), but the feature matching loss has been suppressed and replaced with a more adeguate loss for this task: a correlation loss, which ensures that the recreated signals not only resemble a screaming sound (like enforced by the GAN approach) but that they also match the original audios. This has been carried out by bringing the original and artificial waveforms into a mel-spectrogram representation (operating in a space that gives more precision in reproducing sound fidelity, like repeating the exact same original words) and then maximizing their cosine similarity (thus their correlation).

Results

The model needs to be trained on two datasets: one consisting of the audio files the network will have to transform (diversified in genres, voices and styles); the other made up of screams (diversified in terms of vocal techniques) coming from real metal songs.
The first dataset can be found inside data/Dataset/Vocals and it is a preprocessed version of the well-known GTZAN dataset ²: vocal tracks have been separated from instruments by means of an external AI (there are many free options online) and silence has been removed.
This network has been trained for 100k steps, using a batch size of 8. Other training parameters can be found inside the src/config.py module.

Here are some samples:

Original tracks

disco_original.mp4

hiphop_original.mp4

reggae_original.mp4

rock_1_original.mp4

rock_2_original.mp4

ScreamNet tracks

disco_scream.mp4

hiphop_scream.mp4

reggae_scream.mp4

rock_1_scream.mp4

rock_2_scream.mp4

These results show a good quality in the screaming effect, with little to no imperfections (e.g., no distortions, noise or missing words), depending on the original voice. It can also be noticed how the model operates differently adjusting the screaming techique to fit vocals at best, taking into account factors such as intonation, rythm and timbre.

More samples can be found here, where vocals have been merged back to instrumental parts, effectively giving rise to metal covers of real songs.

How to use it

In order to transform a new audio into its screaming version, it is necessary to download the pre-trained weights from here and put them into weights/Vocals.
Then, it is as simple as opening a terminal inside the main directory and running this command:

python audio_to_scream.py "input_file_path"

Results will be saved inside results. Note that the input file is required to be in mp3 format and that it should only contain a vocal track, by separating it from the rest of the instruments beforehand (for instance, by means of this, if necessary.

How to train it

The network can be easily trained by accessing the file src/config.py and setting all the desired parameters (though it is highly suggested to keep the most important ones fixed). Subsequently it is sufficient to run this command:

python train.py

Both datasets (Vocals and Screams) will have to be specified (it is also possible to experiment with other effects, different from the screaming one, by putting in a dataset with its unique style). It is highly suggested to preprocess these two datasets by removing silences. This can be easily achieved by executing the remove_silence script, which takes as inputs the location (directory) of the original audio files and the target location to put silenced results in:

python remove_silence.py "input_folder_path" "output_folder_path"

App

This AI system has been designed so to be extremely fast (it also implements mixed precision), light and capable of working at a speed that allows it to be used for realtime applications and in mobile devices.
To test these abilities, an Android application has been released, allowing to exploit the integrated microphone in mobile devices to transform users' voices (even in realtime), for fun or musical experiments. The source code of this app (developed with Android Studio), is placed inside the Screamify folder; it can be built from there, or the apk can be directly accessed through the Releases of this repository.

Moreover, a new trained model can be directly converted into a tflite model by running the command:

python convert_to_lite_model.py

Which will save the output into weights/lite model.

Footnotes

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06711 ↩

2. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~gtzan/work/pubs/tsap02gtzan.pdf ↩