Breaking Speech Recognizers to Imagine Lyrics

Abstract: We introduce a new method for generating text, and in particular song lyrics, based on the speech-like acoustic qualities of a given audio file. We repurpose a vocal source separation algorithm and an acoustic model trained to recognize isolated speech, instead inputting instrumental music or environmental sounds. Feeding the "mistakes" of the vocal separator into the recognizer, we obtain a transcription of words \emph{imagined} to be spoken in the input audio. We describe the key components of our approach, present initial analysis, and discuss the potential of the method for machine-in-the-loop collaboration in creative applications.