SyncViolinist: Music-Oriented Violin Motion Generation Based on Bowing and Fingering

Automatically generating realistic musical performance motion can greatly enhance digital media production, often involving collaboration between professionals and musicians. However, capturing the intricate body, hand, and finger movements required for accurate musical performances is challenging. Existing methods often fall short due to the complex mapping between audio and motion, typically requiring additional inputs like scores or MIDI data. In this work, we present SyncViolinist, a multi-stage end-to-end framework that generates synchronized violin performance motion solely from audio input. Our method overcomes the challenge of capturing both global and fine-grained performance features through two key modules: a bowing/fingering module and a motion generation module. The bowing/fingering module extracts detailed playing information from the audio, which the motion generation module uses to create precise, coordinated body motions reflecting the temporal granularity and nature of the violin performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SyncViolinist with significantly improved qualitative and quantitative results from unseen violin performance audio, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Extensive subjective evaluations involving professional violinists further validate our approach. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Kakanat/SyncViolinist.

Do We Need Sound for Sound Source Localization?

During the performance of sound source localization which uses both visual and aural information, it presently remains unclear how much either image or sound modalities contribute to the result, i.e. do we need both image and sound for sound source localization? To address this question, we develop an unsupervised learning system that solves sound source localization by decomposing this task into two steps: (i) "potential sound source localization", a step that localizes possible sound sources using only visual information (ii) "object selection", a step that identifies which objects are actually sounding using aural information. Our overall system achieves state-of-the-art performance in sound source localization, and more importantly, we find that despite the constraint on available information, the results of (i) achieve similar performance. From this observation and further experiments, we show that visual information is dominant in "sound" source localization when evaluated with the currently adopted benchmark dataset. Moreover, we show that the majority of sound-producing objects within the samples in this dataset can be inherently identified using only visual information, and thus that the dataset is inadequate to evaluate a system's capability to leverage aural information. As an alternative, we present an evaluation protocol that enforces both visual and aural information to be leveraged, and verify this property through several experiments.