Machines learn to play Tabla, Part – 2

This is a followup on my earlier post on Machines Learn to play Tabla. You may wish it check it out first reading this one…

Three years ago, I published a post on using recurrent neural networks to generate tabla rhythms. Sampling music from machine learned models was not in vogue then. My post received a lot of attention on the web and became very popular. The project had been a proof-of-concept and I have wanted build on it for a long time now.

This weekend, I worked on making it more interactive and I am excited to share these updates with you. Previously, I was using a proprietary software to convert tabla notation to sound. That made it hard to experiment with sampled rhythms and I could share only a handful sounds. Taking inspiration from our friends at Vishwamohini, I am now able to convert bols into rhythm on the fly using MIDI.js.

Let me show off the new javascript synthesizer using a popular Delhi kaida. Hit the ‘play’ button to listen:

Now that you’ve heard the computer play, here’s an example of it being played by a tabla maestro:

Of course, the synthesized outcome is not much of a comparison to the performance by the maestro, but it is not too bad either…

Now to the more exciting part- Since our browsers have learned to play the tabla, we can throw in the char-rnn model that I built in the earlier post.  To do this, I used the RecurrentJS library and combined it with my javascript tabla player:

Feel free to play around with tempo and maximum character-limit for sampling. When you click on ‘generate’,  it will play a new rhythm every time. Hope you’ll enjoy playing with it as much as I did!

The player has a few kinks at this point I am working towards fixing them. You too can contribute to my repository on GitHub.

There are two areas that need major work:

Data: The models that I trained for my earlier post was done using a small amount of training data. I have been on a lookout for better dataset since then. I wrote a few emails, but without much success till now. I am interested in knowing about more datasets I could train my models on.

Modeling: Our model did a very good job of understanding the structure of TaalMala notations. Although character level recurrent neural networks work well, it is still based on very shallow understanding of the rhythmic structures. I have not come across any good approaches for generating true rhythms yet:

Do any ML poetry generators do rhyme or meter yet? Seems like a hard feature to model/train (compared to a grammar or constraint approach, etc)

Im curious if anyone got it yet

— Kate Compton (@GalaxyKate) March 17, 2018

I think more data samples covering a range of rhythmic structures would only partially address this problem. Simple rule based approaches seem to outperform machine learned models with very little effort. Vishwamohini.com has some very good rule-based variation generators that you could check out.  They sound better than the ones created by our AI. After all the word for compositions- bandish, literally derived from ‘rules’ in Hindi. But on the other hand, there are only so many handcrafted rules that you can come up with which may lead to generating repetitive sounds.

Contact me if you have some ideas and if you’d like to help out! Hope that I am able to post an update on this sooner than three years this time 😀