# VQCPC-GAN: Variable-Length Adversarial Audio Synthesis Using Vector-Quantized Contrastive Predictive Coding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01531/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06711/) (2019)
- [vq-wav2vec: Self-Supervised Learning of Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05453/) (2019)
- [Neural Audio Synthesis of Musical Notes with WaveNet Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01279/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04208/) (2018)
- [Fr'echet Audio Distance: A Metric for Evaluating Music Enhancement Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08466/) (2018)
- [C-RNN-GAN: Continuous recurrent neural networks with adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09904/) (2016)
- [GANSynth: Adversarial Neural Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08710/) (2019)
- [High Fidelity Speech Synthesis with Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11646/) (2019)
- [Vector-quantized neural networks for acoustic unit discovery in the ZeroSpeech 2020 challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09409/) (2020)
- [DrumGAN: Synthesis of Drum Sounds With Timbral Feature Conditioning Using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12073/) (2020)
- [Comparing Representations for Audio Synthesis Using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09266/) (2020)
- [Audio Codec Enhancement with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09653/) (2020)
- [A Multi-Discriminator CycleGAN for Unsupervised Non-Parallel Speech Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00522/) (2018)
- [Vector Quantized Contrastive Predictive Coding for Template-based Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10120/) (2020)
- [Signal Representations for Synthesizing Audio Textures with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07390/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Evaluating generative audio systems and their metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00130/) (2022)
- [LiveBand: Live Accompaniment Generation in the Audio Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03803/) (2026)
- [DPN-GAN: Inducing Periodic Activations in Generative Adversarial Networks for High-Fidelity Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09091/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Influenced by the field of Computer Vision, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are often adopted for the audio domain using fixed-size two-dimensional spectrogram representations as the "image data". However, in the (musical) audio domain, it is often desired to generate output of variable duration. This paper presents VQCPC-GAN, an adversarial framework for synthesizing variable-length audio by exploiting Vector-Quantized Contrastive Predictive Coding (VQCPC). A sequence of VQCPC tokens extracted from real audio data serves as conditional input to a GAN architecture, providing step-wise time-dependent features of the generated content. The input noise z (characteristic in adversarial architectures) remains fixed over time, ensuring temporal consistency of global features. We evaluate the proposed model by comparing a diverse set of metrics against various strong baselines. Results show that, even though the baselines score best, VQCPC-GAN achieves comparable performance even when generating variable-length audio. Numerous sound examples are provided in the accompanying website, and we release the code for reproducibility.