# Taming Visually Guided Sound Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08791 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08791/

## Key facts

- Cited by 136 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 136)

- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12661/) (2023)
- [Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09983/) (2022)
- [Diff-Foley: Synchronized Video-to-Audio Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17203/) (2023)
- [MMAudio: Taming Multimodal Joint Training for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15322/) (2024)
- [Seeing and Hearing: Open-domain Visual-Audio Generation with Diffusion Latent Aligners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17723/) (2024)
- [FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01494/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Audio Diffusion Models: Text To Speech Synthesis and Enhancement in Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13336/) (2023)
- [V2A-Mapper: A Lightweight Solution for Vision-to-Audio Generation by Connecting Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09300/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Unsupervised and Text-Based Audio Editing Using DDPM Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10009/) (2024)
- [Frieren: Efficient Video-to-Audio Generation Network with Rectified Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00320/) (2024)
- [Conditional Generation of Audio from Video via Foley Analogies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08490/) (2023)
- [Temporally Aligned Audio for Video with Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13689/) (2024)
- [Video-Guided Foley Sound Generation with Multimodal Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17698/) (2024)
- [Read, Watch and Scream! Sound Generation from Text and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05551/) (2024)
- [SemantiCodec: An Ultra Low Bitrate Semantic Audio Codec for General Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00233/) (2024)
- [Learning in Audio-visual Context: A Review, Analysis, and New Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09579/) (2022)
- [Sound to Visual Scene Generation by Audio-to-Visual Latent Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17490/) (2023)
- [The ObjectFolder Benchmark: Multisensory Learning with Neural and Real Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00956/) (2023)
- [Kling-Foley: Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19774/) (2025)
- [Quantized GAN for Complex Music Generation from Dance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00604/) (2022)
- [TAVGBench: Benchmarking Text to Audible-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14381/) (2024)
- [Tell What You Hear From What You See -- Video to Audio Generation Through Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05679/) (2024)
- [Controllable Music Production with Diffusion Models and Guidance Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00613/) (2023)
- [Text-to-Audio Generation Synchronized with Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07938/) (2024)
- [Masked Generative Video-to-Audio Transformers with Enhanced Synchronicity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10387/) (2024)
- [Video-to-Audio Generation with Hidden Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07464/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08051/) (2023)
- [SyncFusion: Multimodal Onset-synchronized Video-to-Audio Foley Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15247/) (2023)
- [MMDisCo: Multi-Modal Discriminator-Guided Cooperative Diffusion for Joint Audio and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17842/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in visually-induced audio generation are based on sampling short, low-fidelity, and one-class sounds. Moreover, sampling 1 second of audio from the state-of-the-art model takes minutes on a high-end GPU. In this work, we propose a single model capable of generating visually relevant, high-fidelity sounds prompted with a set of frames from open-domain videos in less time than it takes to play it on a single GPU. We train a transformer to sample a new spectrogram from the pre-trained spectrogram codebook given the set of video features. The codebook is obtained using a variant of VQGAN trained to produce a compact sampling space with a novel spectrogram-based perceptual loss. The generated spectrogram is transformed into a waveform using a window-based GAN that significantly speeds up generation. Considering the lack of metrics for automatic evaluation of generated spectrograms, we also build a family of metrics called FID and MKL. These metrics are based on a novel sound classifier, called Melception, and designed to evaluate the fidelity and relevance of open-domain samples. Both qualitative and quantitative studies are conducted on small- and large-scale datasets to evaluate the fidelity and relevance of generated samples. We also compare our model to the state-of-the-art and observe a substantial improvement in quality, size, and computation time. Code, demo, and samples: v-iashin.github.io/SpecVQGAN