Recent advances in foundation models have enabled audio-generative models that produce high-fidelity sounds associated with music, events, and human actions. Despite the success achieved in modern audio-generative models, the conventional approach to assessing the quality of the audio generation relies heavily on distance metrics like Frechet Audio Distance. In contrast, we aim to evaluate the quality of audio generation by examining the effectiveness of using them as training data. Specifically, we conduct studies to explore the use of synthetic audio for audio recognition. Moreover, we investigate whether synthetic audio can serve as a resource for data augmentation in speech-related modeling. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the potential of using synthetic audio for audio recognition and speech-related modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/usc-sail/SynthAudio.

A summary/gallery of some of the awesome student projects students in this class worked on. Without exception, we had amazing project presentations this semester.

As the technology is advancing, audio recognition in machine learning is improved as well. Research in audio recognition has traditionally focused on speech. Living creatures (especially the small ones) are part of the whole ecosystem, monitoring as well as maintaining them are important tasks. Species such as animals and birds are tending to change their activities as well as their habitats due to the adverse effects on the environment or due to other natural or man-made calamities. For those in far deserted areas, we will not have any idea about their existence until we can continuously monitor them. Continuous monitoring will take a lot of hard work and labor. If there is no continuous monitoring, then there might be instances where endangered species may encounter dangerous situations. The best way to monitor those species are through audio recognition. Classifying sound can be a difficult task even for humans. Powerful audio signals and their processing techniques make it possible to detect audio of various species. There might be many ways wherein audio recognition can be done. We can train machines either by pre-recorded audio files or by recording them live and detecting them. The audio of species can be detected by removing all the background noise and echoes. Smallest sound is considered as a syllable. Extracting various syllables is the process we are focusing on which is known as audio recognition in terms of Machine Learning (ML).

He showed the image recognition network stills taken from short videos while the audio recognition network was trained on 1-second audio clips taken from the same point in each video. The algorithm learned to recognise audio and visual concepts, including crowds, tap dancing and water, without ever seeing a specific label for a single concept. But until we reach that point, self-supervised learning might be a good way of training image and audio recognition algorithms without input from vast amounts of human-labelled data. "Most of the data in the world is unlabelled and therefore it makes sense to develop systems that can learn from unlabelled data," Agrawal says.