Making an AI Violin VST and want to gauge interest
I'm a CS Major who has been composing and playing violin for 10+ years, and has recently started with music production. I noticed that there aren't many good violin VSTs, and the ones that are good cost a lot, so I'd figured that I'd take a crack at it this summer. I showed results to a couple of friends and they said it sounds fairly good, so I was toying with the idea to sell it for free/for non-free/have a donation box after I work on it some more.
I know AI is a controversial subject, so I want to pre-emptively defend myself.
Training data: All training data was recorded by me in my bedroom, i.e. no stolen/scraped audio.
Environmental impact: minimal since I trained the model on my laptop in a few hours.
No cloud-based service: large AI services are hosted by the companies themselves since they can't run on laptops/computers. This isn't an issue because my models are small enough to run locally.
Deterministic output: A concern that I've seen online with one of the existing AI-powered VSTs is reproducibility, since many of these methods are inherently random. I designed my paradigm to be inherently deterministic (the same, predictable audio output every time).
Controllability: In order to keep the expressivity of the violin, I have user controls for articulations, note shape (swells etc.), and vibrato per note.
AI coding: Yes, I used Claude Code extensively.
Demos
AI Violin only: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6LslVGhvaJ_FGWjrhhykEfB_lG8GGa0/view?usp=sharing
AI Violin + piano + reverb: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mjvUi69j_cierGnj2fIiFTUw-bK1iBgz/view?usp=sharing
Real Violin Training sample: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g2UgDuXjqy7Yu4e8A3vnsCfcZcXx4iMD/view?usp=sharing
The current UI:
What I want to know
Would you use this virtual instrument with its current quality/features?
If so, would you be willing to spend money for it?
If not, is there anything I can change/improve/add?
Is the current output quality acceptable? To improve it, I would need to record more training data. Do you think it would be worth it for me to get a better mic/use a real studio/find a better violinist?
Ultimately, this project is mostly for my resume as an aspiring ML researcher, but I also plan to use it for my own musical projects in the future. Thank you for reading, listening, and responding!
