From Sound to Sight: Towards AI-authored Music Videos

Leo Vitasovic, Stella Graßhof, Agnes Mercedes Kloft, Ville V. Lehtola, Martin Cunneen, Justyna Starostka, Glenn Mcgarry, Kun Li, Sami Sebastian Brandt; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2025, pp. 3792-3802

Conventional music visualisation systems rely on handcrafted ad hoc transformations of shapes and colours that offer only limited expressiveness. We propose two novel pipelines for automatically generating music videos from any user-specified, vocal or instrumental song using off-the-shelf deep learning models. Inspired by the manual workflows of music video producers, we experiment on how well latent feature-based techniques can analyse audio to detect musical qualities, such as emotional cues and instrumental patterns, and distil them into textual scene descriptions using a language model. Next, we employ a generative model to produce the corresponding video clips. To assess the generated videos, we identify several critical aspects and design and conduct a preliminary user evaluation that demonstrates storytelling potential, visual coherency and emotional alignment with the music. Our findings underscore the potential of latent feature techniques and deep generative models to expand music visualisation beyond traditional approaches.