WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio • Hacker News Board

Re: WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio

#151

Post by mdip » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 2:54 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #137

mdip wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an audiobook junkie and as far as professional narrators go, I think it'd be hard to replace a high-end performance with something computer generated and end up with the level of quality offered by the likes of a great narrator like Scott Brick. I mention him by name because it was him that made me realize how important good quality narration is. I had purchased a book at an airport bookstore on a whim and while…

I only fell in love with the voice of a single audiobook narrator. I checked, and yes, he was Scott Brick. I think he adds about 50% on top of the value of the written book by his interpretation.

He's incredible - some people complain that he's a little bit of a slow reader, but audio book apps usually have a speed option. He enunciates well and adds a depth of feeling to the work that can take a book that's average up several notches.

He's also the only narrator that I can name[0].

[0] Who isn't well known for other things -- Douglas Adams narrated his entire series, and some actors are also regular audio book narrators, but Scott Brick is purely a narrator (or at least, was when I last looked).

Re: WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio

#152

Post by jay-anderson » Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 5:13 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #135

jay-anderson wrote: post #105

Any suggestions on where to start learning how to implement this? I understand some of the high level concepts (and took an intro AI class years ago - probably not terribly useful), but some of them are very much over my head (e.g. 2.2 Softmax Distributions and 2.3 Gated Activation Units) and some parts of the paper feel somewhat hand-wavy (2.6 Context Stacks). Any pointers would be useful as I attempt to understand…

Best advice is to wait for a version to pop up on github. It's hard to implement such a paper as a beginner.

https://github.com/ibab/tensorflow-wavenet - looks like they're starting to show up.

Re: WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio

#153

Post by Falcon9 » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 12:28 AM UTC

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #95

grandalf wrote: post #7

This is incredible. I'd be worried if I were a professional audiobook reader :)

I worked for Audible for five years, and this exact conversation was had often in my division (ACX.com - Audible's "Audiobook Creation Exchange".) Audible brought ACX together in order to bolster its catalog. The company-wide initiative was called PTTM ('pedal to the metal') and ACX was Audible's secret weapon to gain an enormous competitive foothold over the rest of the audiobook industry. Because we paid amateurs d…

I've listened to some LibriVox recordings of public domain works, notably A Princess of Mars. The price was right at the time, though the quality was, as you say, remarkably subpar. If I could have had a neural net read me the book instead of having to change with narrators changing every chapter, that would have been preferable.

That said, I have money now, so give me Todd McLaren narrating Altered Carbon for the cost of an Audible Credit every time.