# Machine Learning Upscaling for samples



## Andrew Sherwin (Jan 14, 2021)

Hi folks - new around here but recently got into making samples. I was watching a yt video detailing how a guy upscaled the sky boxes in the original half-life game using machine learning to see what difference it might make, and I wondered why this wouldn't be possible for audio too? One of the things I've enjoyed recently with sampling is capturing things at a much higher sample rate than I normally would, and then stretching it to find all the interesting harmonics that you wouldn't normally hear. Reconstructing upper harmonics with machine learning might give different results for this kind of thing and it could be interesting for sound design. Any one else been down this line of thinking? 
I'm not exactly a very computery person, but this was just a bit of an audio related shower-thought...


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## MartinH. (Jan 14, 2021)

Welcome to the forum!



Andrew Sherwin said:


> I was watching a yt video detailing how a guy upscaled the sky boxes in the original half-life game using machine learning to see what difference it might make



Was it on one of the 3 kliksphilip youtube channels? If not, check him out if you're interested in AI upscaling. 




Andrew Sherwin said:


> and I wondered why this wouldn't be possible for audio too? One of the things I've enjoyed recently with sampling is capturing things at a much higher sample rate than I normally would, and then stretching it to find all the interesting harmonics that you wouldn't normally hear.



It might be possible but when you slow it down you might as well go straight for more creative AI based processing imho. And if you don't, then you're generating frequencies that humans can't hear anyway. 

It might be interesting to experiment with training a model on downsampled poor quality wavs as input and the original high quality wavs as targets to upscale lofi samples from old games etc.. I'd assume someone has already done that.


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## Andrew Sherwin (Jan 14, 2021)

MartinH. said:


> Was it on one of the 3 kliksphilip youtube channels? If not, check him out if you're interested in AI upscaling.



Haha yeah it actually was his video! I like you're idea of reversing the process, there could be some really awesome distortion modelling with that.


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