Harmony-Aware Music-driven Motion Synthesis with Perceptual Constraint on UGC Datasets

Abstract: With the popularity of video-based user-generated content (UGC) on social media, harmony, as dictated by human perceptual principles, is critical in assessing the rhythmic consistency of audio-visual UGCs for better user engagement. In this work, we propose a novel harmony-aware GAN framework, following a specifically designed harmony evaluation strategy to enhance rhythmic synchronization in the automatic music-to-motion synthesis using a UGC dance dataset. This harmony strategy utilizes refined cross-modal beat detection to capture closely correlated audio and visual rhythms in an audio-visual pair. To mimic human attention mechanism, we introduce saliency-based beat weighting and interval-driven beat alignment, which ensures accurate harmony score estimation consistent with human perception. Building on this strategy, our model, employing efficient encoder-decoder and depth-lifting designs, is adversarially trained based on categorized musical meter segments to generate realistic and rhythmic 3D human motions. We further incorporate our harmony evaluation strategy as a weakly supervised perceptual constraint to flexibly guide the synchronized audio-visual rhythms during the generation process. Experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms other leading music-to-motion methods in rhythmic harmony, both quantitatively and qualitatively, even with limited UGC training data. Live samples 15 can be watched at: https://youtu.be/tWwz7yq4aUs