Overview

A neural audio autoencoder (such as RAVE) is an AI audio generation tool, it has two components: an encoder and a decoder.

• The encoder compresses a piece of audio signal into a sequence of latent vectors (a latent trajectory). This compression happens in the time domain, so that the sampling rate goes from 44100Hz (audio sampling rate) to 21.5Hz (latent space sampling rate).
• The decoder takes the latent trajectory to produce a piece of audio signal. The decoder can also be used as a parametric synthesiser by navigating the latent space (i.e., latent space walk).
• A latent terrain is a surface map created from the latent trajectory, just like looking at a latent trajectory from above.

It allows you to navigate latent space of the generative AI like walking on a terrain surface, tailoring the latent space to a low-dimensional (e.g., a 2D plane) control space.

And this terrain surface is nonlinear (i.e., able to produce complex sequential patterns), continuous (i.e., allows for smooth interpolations), and tailorable (i.e., DIY your own materials with interactive machine learning).

An example latent space walk with Music2Latent: