Abstract
In this article, we present R-VAE, a system designed for the modeling and exploration of latent spaces learned from rhythms encoded in MIDI clips. The system is based on a variational autoencoder neural network, uses a data structure that is capable of encoding rhythms in simple and compound meter, and can learn models from little training data. To facilitate the exploration of models, we implemented a visualizer that relies on the dynamic nature of the pulsing rhythmic patterns. To test our system in real-life musical practice, we collected small-scale datasets of contemporary music genre rhythms and trained models with them. We found that the non-linearities of the learned latent spaces coupled with tactile interfaces to interact with the models were very expressive and led to unexpected places in musical composition and live performance settings. A music album was recorded and it was premiered at a major music festival using the VAE latent space on stage.
Keywords
Rhythm, Meter, Latent space, Music visualization
How to Cite
Vigliensoni, G., McCallum, L., Maestre, E. & Fiebrink, R., (2022) “R-VAE: Live latent space drum rhythm generation from minimal-size datasets”, Journal of Creative Music Systems 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.5920/jcms.902
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