Music synthesis for home videos

Abstract

AbstractMusic in cinema has come a long way since the days of silent movies. Adding soundto movies adds excitement, suspense and right emotional impact, thus lending themthe essential A?fth dimension. But this creative and artistic ability of professional artistsis not available to amateur home video makers. The need to make home videos moreappealing has spurred research in the area of audio-video mixing.Earlier eA?orts have produced music digests, where diA?erent video clips are added tomusic based on their suitability. The proposed method here is a novel one - of addingmusic to videos by means of synthesizing music. It is a semi-automatic mixing solutionwhere the users select music of his/her choice and music adapted to every video isgenerated. The cinematic heuristics of adding sound to movies provides the mappingbetween the audio-video elements. The low level audio elements derive values from theirvideo counterparts. To reA?ne the audio elements into pleasing music further, analogicalmethod is adopted. The music elements considered for composition are pitch, dynamicsand tempo. In this method, examples are provided in order to generate these elements.Music can be represented as a wave, symbolic notation or a contour. Here, themusic is represented in MIDI. The pitch of example midi music is represented as a con-tour, which is emulated during composition using sequence based comparison methodimplemented through dynamic programming technique. The tempo is generated usingequal tempered scale and dynamics is varied linearly according to brightness of videos.The results produced have been tested by users. They are well-received and en-couraging, proving that the synthesized music goes toward enhancing video appeal.