A team of generative AI researchers created a Swiss Army knife for sound, one that allows users to control the audio output simply using text.
While some AI models can compose a song or modify a voice, none have the dexterity of the new offering.
Called Fugatto (short for Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1), it generates or transforms any mix of music, voices and sounds described with prompts using any combination of text and audio files.
For example, it can create a music snippet based on a text prompt, remove or add instruments from an existing song, change the accent or emotion in a voice — even let people produce sounds never heard before.
“This thing is wild,” said Ido Zmishlany, a multi-platinum producer and songwriter — and cofounder of One Take Audio, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups. “Sound is my inspiration. It’s what moves me to create music. The idea that I can create entirely new sounds on the fly in the studio is incredible.”
A Sound Grasp of Audio
“We wanted to create a model that understands and generates sound like humans do,” said Rafael Valle, a manager of applied audio research at NVIDIA and one of the dozen-plus people behind Fugatto, as well as an orchestral conductor and composer.
Supporting numerous audio generation and transformation tasks, Fugatto is the first foundational generative AI model that showcases emergent properties — capabilities that arise from the interaction of its various trained abilities — and the ability to combine free-form instructions.
“Fugatto is our first step toward a future where unsupervised multitask learning in audio synthesis and transformation emerges from data and model scale,” Valle said.
A Sample Playlist of Use Cases
For example, music producers could use Fugatto to quickly prototype or edit an idea for a song, trying out different styles, voices and instruments. They could also add effects and enhance the overall audio quality of an existing track.
“The history of music is also a history of technology. The electric guitar gave the world rock and roll. When the sampler showed up, hip-hop was born,” said Zmishlany. “With AI, we’re writing the next chapter of music. We have a new instrument, a new tool for making music — and that’s super exciting.”
An ad agency could apply Fugatto to quickly target an existing campaign for multiple regions or situations, applying different accents and emotions to voiceovers.
Language learning tools could be personalized to use any voice a speaker chooses. Imagine an online course spoken in the voice of any family member or friend.
Video game developers could use the model to modify prerecorded assets in their title to fit the changing action as users play the game. Or, they could create new assets on the fly from text instructions and optional audio inputs.
Making a Joyful Noise
“One of the model’s capabilities we’re especially proud of is what we call the avocado chair,” said Valle, referring to a novel visual created by a generative AI model for imaging.
For instance, Fugatto can make a trumpet bark or a saxophone meow. Whatever users can describe, the model can create.
With fine-tuning and small amounts of singing data, researchers found it could handle tasks it was not pretrained on, like generating a high-quality singing voice from a text prompt.
Users Get Artistic Controls
Several capabilities add to Fugatto’s novelty.
During inference, the model uses a technique called ComposableART to combine instructions that were only seen separately during training. For example, a combination of prompts could ask for text spoken with a sad feeling in a French accent.
The model’s ability to interpolate between instructions gives users fine-grained control over text instructions, in this case the heaviness of the accent or the degree of sorrow.
“I wanted to let users combine attributes in a subjective or artistic way, selecting how much emphasis they put on each one,” said Rohan Badlani, an AI researcher who designed these aspects of the model.
“In my tests, the results were often surprising and made me feel a little bit like an artist, even though I’m a computer scientist,” said Badlani, who holds a master’s degree in computer science with a focus on AI from Stanford.
The model also generates sounds that change over time, a feature he calls temporal interpolation. It can, for instance, create the sounds of a rainstorm moving through an area with crescendos of thunder that slowly fade into the distance. It also gives users fine-grained control over how the soundscape evolves.
Plus, unlike most models, which can only recreate the training data they’ve been exposed to, Fugatto allows users to create soundscapes it’s never seen before, such as a thunderstorm easing into a dawn with the sound of birds singing.
A Look Under the Hood
Fugatto is a foundational generative transformer model that builds on the team’s prior work in areas such as speech modeling, audio vocoding and audio understanding.
The full version uses 2.5 billion parameters and was trained on a bank of NVIDIA DGX systems packing 32 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.
Fugatto was made by a diverse group of people from around the world, including India, Brazil, China, Jordan and South Korea. Their collaboration made Fugatto’s multi-accent and multilingual capabilities stronger.
One of the hardest parts of the effort was generating a blended dataset that contains millions of audio samples used for training. The team employed a multifaceted strategy to generate data and instructions that considerably expanded the range of tasks the model could perform, while achieving more accurate performance and enabling new tasks without requiring additional data.
They also scrutinized existing datasets to reveal new relationships among the data. The overall work spanned more than a year.
Valle remembers two moments when the team knew it was on to something. “The first time it generated music from a prompt, it blew our minds,” he said.
Later, the team demoed Fugatto responding to a prompt to create electronic music with dogs barking in time to the beat.
“When the group broke up with laughter, it really warmed my heart.”
Hear what Fugatto can do: