ScripTONES: Sentiment-Conditioned Music Generation for Movie Scripts

Film scores are considered an essential part of the film cinematic experience, but the process of film score generation is often expensive and infeasible for small-scale creators. Automating the process of film score composition would provide useful starting points for music in small projects. In this paper, we propose a two-stage pipeline for generating music from a movie script. The first phase is the Sentiment Analysis phase where the sentiment of a scene from the film script is encoded into the valence-arousal continuous space. The second phase is the Conditional Music Generation phase which takes as input the valence-arousal vector and conditionally generates piano MIDI music to match the sentiment. We study the efficacy of various music generation architectures by performing a qualitative user survey and propose methods to improve sentiment-conditioning in VAE architectures.

A Comparative Study of Algorithms for Intelligent Traffic Signal Control

In this paper, methods have been explored to effectively optimise traffic signal control to minimise waiting times and queue lengths, thereby increasing traffic flow. The traffic intersection was first defined as a Markov Decision Process, and a state representation, actions and rewards were chosen. Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) was used to simulate an intersection and then compare a Round Robin Scheduler, a Feedback Control mechanism and two Reinforcement Learning techniques - Deep Q Network (DQN) and Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C), as the policy for the traffic signal in the simulation under different scenarios. Finally, the methods were tested on a simulation of a real-world intersection in Bengaluru, India.