R-VAE: Live latent space drum rhythm generation from minimal-size datasets

In this article, we present R-VAE, a system designed for the modeling and exploration of latent spaces learned from rhythms encoded in MIDI clips. The system is based on a variational autoencoder neural network, uses a data structure that is capable of encoding rhythms in simple and compound meter, and can learn models from little training data. To facilitate the exploration of models, we implemented a visualizer that relies on the dynamic nature of the pulsing rhythmic patterns. To test our system in real-life musical practice, we collected small-scale datasets of contemporary music genre rhythms and trained models with them. We found that the non-linearities of the learned latent spaces coupled with tactile interfaces to interact with the models were very expressive and led to unexpected places in musical composition and live performance settings. A music album was recorded and it was premiered at a major music festival using the VAE latent space on stage.