Sound Transformation: Applying Image Neural Style Transfer Networks to Audio Spectograms

Image style transfer networks are used to blend images, producing images that are a mix of source images. The process is based on controlled extraction of style and content aspects of images, using pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Our interest lies in adopting these image style transfer networks for the purpose of transforming sounds. Audio signals can be presented as grey-scale images of audio spectrograms. The purpose of our work is to investigate whether audio spectrogram inputs can be used with image neural transfer networks to produce new sounds. Using musical instrument sounds as source sounds, we apply and compare three existing image neural style transfer networks for the task of sound mixing. Our evaluation shows that all three networks are successful in producing consistent, new sounds based on the two source sounds. We use classification models to demonstrate that the new audio signals are consistent and distinguishable from the source instrument sounds. We further apply t-SNE cluster visualisation to visualise the feature maps of the new sounds and original source sounds, confirming that they form different sound groups from the source sounds. Our work paves the way to using CNNs for creative and targeted production of new sounds from source sounds, with specified source qualities, including pitch and timbre.