Latent Audio Effects (LaFX)
LaFX explores creative audio effects by manipulating neural audio codec latents, producing textures and transformations that are hard to achieve in sample space.
LaFX treats neural audio codecs as a creative medium rather than purely a compression tool, inspired by practices like MP3 glitching and databending. By operating directly in the compressed latent domain, it enables novel sound design operations such as latent mixing, crossfading, and noise injection that yield distinct artifacts and textures. The project prototypes these ideas using a pretrained DAC codec and demonstrates interactive controls like codebook-wise “knobs” for latent noise generation. Ongoing experiments extend this direction to latent-space delay, saturation, and more general latent transformations.