Transdrums: A Drum Pattern Transfer System Preserving Global Pattern Structure

Abstract

This paper presents TransDrums, which is a system that transfers drum patterns from a drum-pattern-source song (D-song) to a base song (B-song) and synthesizes the audio with the substituted drum pattern. Typical drum parts consist of multiple drum patterns that are concatenated to form a structure by, for example, inserting fill-in patterns at structural boundaries. The previous system that replaced the drum parts was not able to form such a structure. Therefore, we propose TransDrums, which extracts and transfers multiple drum patterns to form the structure. It takes two songs as the input and extracts multiple typical drum patterns from each song. It then makes pairs of those patterns between B-song and D-song and replaces them using the counterpart drum patterns to synthesize audio with the altered drum pattern. To achieve the key idea of properly replacing a drum phrase in B-song with that in D-song, it is necessary to model the structure of the drum parts by analyzing the transition probabilities between the typical drum patterns. The appropriate pairs are determined so that the sum of the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the transition probabilities is minimized. Our experimental results show that TransDrums can generate audio to change by altering the drum patterns with the structure.