Rafael Valle is a research-driven machine learning scientist and engineering leader with 13 years of experience bridging audio, music, and multimodal generative models, now working at Meta Superintelligence Labs after an eight-year research leadership stint at NVIDIA. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from UC Berkeley in machine listening and improvisation and brings deep domain expertise in music signal processing, MIDI handling, and text-to-speech systems—contributions include meaningful fixes and inference improvements to NVIDIA’s Flowtron and enhancements to the widely used pretty-midi library. Rafael combines rigorous academic training with production-minded research, shipping robust model and data-handling improvements that address precision, padding, and attention-related issues. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he pairs a rare background in orchestral conducting and computer music with applied ML, enabling creative approaches to multimodal generation and machine improvisation.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Interdisciplinary PhD, Machine Listening and Improvisation, Designated Emph. in Computational, Data Science and Engineering, 3.96, Interdisciplinary PhD, Machine Listening and Improvisation, Designated Emph. in Computational, Data Science and Engineering, 3.96 at University of California, Berkeley
Master, Computer Music / Composition, ECU and MH-Stuttgart, Master, Computer Music / Composition, ECU and MH-Stuttgart at MH-Stuttgart
Bachelor's in Orchestral Conducting, Music Performance, General, 9.2/10, Bachelor's in Orchestral Conducting, Music Performance, General, 9.2/10 at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Hindi
Flowtron is an auto-regressive flow-based generative network for text to speech synthesis with control over speech variation and style transfer
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:28 commits, 6 PRs, 40 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Rafael primarily contributed to the `flowtron` repository by modifying the core files, `flowtron.py` and `data.py`. They focused on addressing potential issues related to data handling, padding, and ensuring compatibility with floating-point precision, especially concerning the attention mechanisms. The user also improved the inference capabilities with changes made to `inference.py`, including adding the `torch.no_grad()` context manager for waveglow inference.
Utility functions for handling MIDI data in a nice/intuitive way.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:7 commits, 13 PRs, 47 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Rafael primarily contributed to the core functionality of the `pretty-midi` library, focusing on features related to MIDI data handling. Their work included adding and refining features for retaining key and time signatures, crucial for accurate MIDI file processing. The user also added a utility to convert quarter notes per minute to beats per minute and implemented functionality for pitch class analysis. They demonstrated a strong understanding of MIDI data structures and algorithms.
utility-functionsmidiintuitivehandlingmusic
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.