Our New Sam Audio Model Transforms Audio Editing

8 days ago (about.fb.com)

This is hilariously bad with music. Like I can type in the most basic thing like "string instruments" which should theoretically be super easy to isolate. You can generally one-shot this using spectral analysis libraries. And it just totally fails.

  • I had the same experience. It did okay at isolating vocals but everything else it failed or half-succeeded at.

    • Like most models released for publicity rather than usefulness, they'll do great at benchmarks and single specific use cases, but no one seem to be able to release actually generalized models today.

  • Like everything AI you just have to lie a little and people whith 0 clue abot SOTA in audio will think this is amazing.

  • what in theory makes those "super easy" to isolate? Humans are terrible at this to begin with, it takes years to train one of them to do it mildly well. Computers are even worse - blind source separation and the cocktail party problem have been the white whale of audio DSP for decades (and only very recently did tools become passable).

    • The fact that you can do it with spectral analysis libraries, no LLM required.

      This is much easier than source separation. It would be different if I were asking to isolate a violin from a viola or another violin, you’d have to get much more specific about the timbre of each instrument and potentially understand what each instruments part was.

      But a vibration made from a string makes a very unique wave that is easy to pick out in a file.

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    • >what in theory makes those "super easy" to isolate? Humans are terrible at this to begin with,

      Humans are amazing at it. You can discern the different instruments way better than any stem separating AI.

I recently discovered Audacity includes plug-ins for audio separation that work great (e.g. split into vocals track and instruments track). The model it uses also originated at Facebook (demucs).

FB has been a pioneer in voice and audio, somehow. A couple of years ago FB-Research had a little repo on GitHub that was the best noise-removal / voice-isolation out there. I wanted to use it in Wisprnote and politely emailed the authors. Never heard back (that's okay), but I was so impressed with the perceptual quality and "wind removal" (so hard).

> Visual prompting: Click on the person or object in the video that’s making a sound to isolate their audio.

How does that work? Correlating sound with movement?

  • If it’s anything like the original SAM, thousands of hours of annotator time.

    If I had to do it synthetically, take single subjects with a single sound and combine them together. Then train a model to separate them again.

  • Think about it conceptually:

    Could you watch a music video and say "that's the snare drum, that's the lead singer, keyboard, bass, that's the truck that's making the engine noise, that's the crowd that's cheering, oh and that's a jackhammer in the background"? So can AI.

    Could you point out who is lead guitar and who is rhythm guitar? So can AI.

    • I thought about it. Still seems kind of pointless.

      That doesn't seem any better than typing "rhythm guitar". In fact, it seems worse and with extra steps. Sometimes the thing making the sound is not pictured. This thing is going to make me scrub through the video until the bass player is in frame instead of just typing "bass guitar". Then it will burn some power inferring that the thing I clicked on was a bass.

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This is super cool. Of course, it is possible to separate instrument sounds using specialized tools, but can't wait to see how people use this model for bunch of other use cases, where its not trivial to use those specialized tools:

* remove background noise of tech products, but keep the nature

* isolate the voice of a single person and feed into STT model to improve accuracy

* isolating sound of events in games and many more

I wonder if it works for speaker diarization out of the box. I've found that open source speaker diarization that doesn't require a lot of tweaking is basically non-existent.

I tried this to try to extract some speech from an audio track with heavy noise from wind (filmed out on a windy sea shore without mic windscreen), and the result unfortunately was less intelligible than the original.

I got much better results, though still not perfect, with the voice isolator in ElevenLabs.

I wonder if this would be nice for hearing aid users for reducing the background restaurant babble that overwhelms the people you want to hear.

Given TikToks insane creator adoption rate is Meta developing these models to build out a content creation platform to compete?

  • I doubt it, although it's possible these models will be used for creator tools, I believe the main idea is to use them for data labeling.

    At the time the first SAM was created, Meta was already spending over 2B/year on human labelers. Surely that number is higher now and research like this can dramatically increase data labeling volume

    • > I doubt it, although it's possible these models will be used for creator tools, I believe the main idea is to use them for data labeling.

      How is creating 3D objects and characters (and something resembling bones/armature but isn't) supposed to help with data labeling? As synthetic data for training other models, maybe, but seems like this new release is aimed at improving their own tooling for content creators, hard to deny this considering their demos.

      For the original SAM releases, I agree, that was probably the purpose. But these new ones that generate stuff and do effects and what not, clearly go beyond that initial scope.

I wonder if the segmentation would work with a video of a ventriloquist and a dummy?

Finally a way to perhaps remove laugh tracks in the near future.

Can I create a continuous “who farted” detector? Would be great at parties