[SwellJoe]

I've read the articles about NSynth with interest, but I can't figure out why they're using 8-bit and low sample rates. Surely, it's not that much more computationally intensive that they can't tinker at 8 bits and then do a render at a high resolution once they've settled on some parameters they like.

[doomlaser]

Possibly the same reason all the Style Transfer implementations use very low resolution images? All the neural net applications I've seen seem to have problems with high resolutions in any form.

[svantana]

The 8-bit is actually reasonable: they have one output per possible value, so 16 bit would mean 65k outputs... They could probably do a secondary step that adds less significant bits. The low samplerate is probably because it's originally used for speech, and a lot of speech databases are in 16 kHz.

[mysterydip]

It's probably a similar reason why 8 bit homebrew computers are more popular than 16: the complexity isn't linear.