Music Generation

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11 papers in the last four weeks, up 38% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 79

Oct 5, 2026cs.SD

Adapting a Latent Audio Diffusion Model to Historical Guqin Recordings: A Listening-Driven Case Study

We report a small-data case study in adapting a pretrained latent audio diffusion model to the guqin, the seven-string Chinese zither, aiming at an "AI radio" that plays guqin-style music without end. From a library of historical recordings we curate 412 solo performances (42.5 h, 61 performers) and split them by composition. We fine-tune a rank-16 DoRA adapter on Stable Audio 3 Medium using its continuous latents, masking weighted towards continuation, captions that combine researched notes on each piece with mood tags and an automatically estimated pentatonic mode, and random-length crops, stopping when held-out loss stops improving. Seven blind listening studies by one expert listener guided every decision. The final adapter was rated highest for continuing unseen pieces (3.9/5, against 3.4 for the best earlier adapter) and 4.6/5 for generating from free-written scene descriptions. Negative results are equally informative: a from-scratch autoregressive model over the same latents produced no recognisable timbre, a signal-level friction-noise measure correlated with the listener's complaints in the wrong direction, and a pentatonic-fit measure tracked ratings overall but barely within a group of candidates. Chaining continuations for long playback exposed a silent tail on every generated clip and a loudness feedback loop, both with simple fixes. With one listener and at most ten clips per condition, no paired difference is statistically significant; we present an exploratory record of what helped, what did not, and why.

Huanchen Cai

Division of Speech, Music and Hearing (TMH) KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Text-to-Music Generation Music Generation Evaluation Audio Diffusion Models Diffusion Model Fine-Tuning Music Generation

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

From One-Shot Generation to Incremental Music Composition: Adapting a General-Purpose Instruction LLM for Persistent Symbolic Editing

Most music-generation systems are still framed and evaluated primarily as producers of complete outputs, whereas composition often proceeds through successive revisions to a shared musical artifact. This paper studies a different use of a general-purpose instruction-following large language model: not as a one-shot music generator, but as a reusable operator over an evolving symbolic score. We formulate incremental composition as a sequence of operation-aware state transitions over persistent ABC notation, with explicit requirements on what each operation may change and what it must preserve. The interaction includes two artifact-initialization variants and three editing operations -- chord addition, inpainting, and transposition. We instantiate the formulation by adapting Llama 3.1 8B Instruct with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on 496,038 operation-aware dialogue records derived from Irish traditional music. The comparison with the unadapted model is used to test the feasibility of learning this interaction contract, not to claim novelty for fine-tuning itself. Across 500 dialogues per model (1,750 attempted output states), checker admission rises from 29.37% to 99.37%, while compliance conditional on admission rises from 0.7205 to 0.9798. Strict eligibility for reference-relative musical-feature analysis increases from 14 to 1,548 outputs, and Longest Common Subsequence analysis does not show a systematic increase in high-overlap sequences relative to held-out baselines under the specified protocol. The results support the technical feasibility of persistent, operation-aware symbolic editing with a general-purpose instruction LLM. They do not establish superior musical quality or human-AI co-creativity, which remain questions for musician-centered evaluation.

André Ricardo Ducca Fernandes, Jean-Pierre Briot, Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa1 +1

Department of Informatics (DI), Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22451-900, Brazil · Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, F-75005 Paris, France · CBAE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22250-020, Brazil

Controllable Music Generation Symbolic Music Generation Music Generation

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

From Human Narrative to Harmonic Structure: A Human-Centered Investigation of Algorithmic Music Generation through the Chord Wheel Diagram

Contemporary AI-based music generation can produce compositions that satisfy formal requirements of tonality and musical coherence. However, whether musical expression can be described by mathematical properties alone remains a fundamental question. Human composers operate within personal and cultural contexts that influence harmonic decisions and deliberate departures from established patterns. This study investigates six narrative-driven popular songs by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Ritchie Valens. Original human harmonies are compared with outputs of an explainable computational harmonizer operating on the same melodies without access to the original chord progressions. We examine harmonic vocabulary, functional persistence, repetition, non-diatonic events, and tension-resolution patterns using Chord Wheel Diagrams and BPMN-based representations. Results show that high melody-chord compatibility does not necessarily imply preservation of the original human harmonic decision pattern. Some generated harmonizations retain the economical structure of the reference, while others alter harmonic diversity or suppress distinctive events while remaining compatible with the melody. Rather than quantifying artistic quality, the study introduces narrative-conditioned harmonic structure as a complementary perspective for computational music analysis. The findings suggest that generative systems may benefit from modeling not only harmonic correctness, but also structural identity, context, and human compositional intention.

Josef Pavlíček, Petra Pavlíčková, Irena Štrausová

Faculty of Information Technology, CTU, Thákurova 9, Prague 6, 160 00, Czech Republic · University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, Faculty of Economics, Department of Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Branišovská 1645/31a, České Budějovice, Czech Republic

Music Generation Evaluation Symbolic Music Generation Music Generation

Sep 27, 2026eess.AS

YuE2: Unifying Symbolic and Audio Music Generation at Frontier Quality

Symbolic models make melody, harmony, rhythm, and form explicit but typically stop before a finished recording; audio models produce complete songs while leaving composition implicit. We introduce YuE2, which unifies symbolic and audio music generation at frontier quality through symbolic planning. A single AR-NAR Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) first writes a readable score specifying melody and harmony, expands it into semantic music tokens, and realizes it as full-song audio. In comparisons using the same checkpoint, experts prefer symbolic planning for overall quality and musicality, with 49.3% of overall preferences versus 34.6% without planning. Experts also favor the unified model over a separate language model and diffusion Transformer. On WildSongBench, YuE2 scores 6.73 on SongBench Global Avg, exceeding all evaluated public baselines. Selecting from eight candidates (best-of-8), YuE2 reaches 6.96, the highest observed mean among all evaluated systems. Expert listening further establishes its competitiveness with proprietary song generators, favoring best-of-8 over Suno v4.5 and yielding nearly balanced preferences against Suno v5. To learn this generation process from recordings without aligned scores, we introduce MERT2 and SheetSage2 to supply semantic and symbolic supervision. MERT2 sets a new state of the art in music representation learning, surpassing previous best results on 14 of 15 MARBLE metrics; SheetSage2 leads 12 of 15 benchmark-metric pairs in our lead-sheet transcription comparison. The same checkpoint follows score edits while largely preserving unedited musical content and generates zero-shot covers without cover-specific training. Its readable score also enables agentic music editing, with external language models translating user feedback into revisions of the composition.

Ruibin Yuan, Jiahao Pan, Junyan Jiang +32

HKUST HKGAI M-A-P Tokenwave.AI New York University Stanford University MBZUAI ACE Studio

Audio Representation Learning Controllable Music Generation Symbolic Music Generation Automatic Music Transcription Music Generation Audio Generation

Sep 25, 2026cs.SD

Video-to-Music Generation for Gameplay Videos

Video-to-music models have advanced considerably in the last few years, particularly in film and music video applications. In this paper, we investigate this problem in the video game domain, which introduces new challenges for these models: video frames are rendered graphics, music is mostly synthetic audio, and soundtracks loop across entire levels rather than following on-screen events. We introduce a new dataset of 217.6 hours of Super Nintendo (SNES) gameplay video paired with 485 hours of clean soundtracks, free of sound effects and voice-overs, matched to gameplay audio via audio fingerprinting. With this dataset, we train a simple encoder-decoder transformer that passes video features directly to a MusicGen decoder, comparing different encoding strategies: textual descriptions (T5), independent frames (ViT), or spatiotemporal patches (ViViT). Each encoder is tested both frozen and fine-tuned, while the decoder is always fine-tuned. Frozen encoders match or outperform their fine-tuned counterparts on every metric, and the frozen ViViT achieves the best overall results. We compare this model with state-of-the-art baselines using both objective metrics and a listening study (N = 96). Despite having up to 18% fewer parameters, our model outperforms all baselines on objective metrics, surpasses GVMGen in the listening study, and performs comparably to OSSL.

Felipe Marra, Lucas N. Ferreira

Universidade Federal de Viçosa Departamento de Informática Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brazil · Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Departamento de Ciência da Computação Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Audio-Video Generation Music Generation

Sep 16, 2026cs.SD

CPR: Combining global composing, local performing and full-sequence refining in piano rendering with continuous autoregressive modelling

Prompt-conditioned piano MIDI-to-Music rendering aims to faithfully render target notes while reproducing the timbre of a reference recording. Existing approaches primarily follow two paradigms: autoregressive (AR) modeling and flow matching (or diffusion). Discrete-codec AR models provide causal temporal modeling, but quantization can discard acoustic detail. Flow matching better preserves acoustic structure in the cost of full-sequence attention costs and worse semantic structure. Continuous autoregressive models operate directly on continuous representations. It not only combines the condition-following ability of AR models and distribution-modeling capacity of flow matching but also bypasses the quantization bottleneck with lower computational costs. Building on this principle, we present Composer--Performer--Refiner (CPR) framework. Composer autoregressively predicts continuous hidden states, Performer generates 24kHz acoustic latents through local flow matching and Refiner then upsamples the waveform to 48 kHz. We further introduce Bottlenecked Representation Alignment (BREPA) and Modality--Time RoPE (MT-RoPE) to strengthen musical semantic structure in Composer hidden states and temporal alignments across modalities. Codes are available at https://github.com/FEAfeatherTHER/CPR_official

Chong Jing, Junan Zhang, Zhizheng Wu

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Controllable Music Generation Music Generation Autoregressive Modeling

Sep 16, 2026cs.HC

Encypher: Shared Agency and Social Presence in Collaborative Music Generation for Dance Cyphers

Music and dance are social practices of expression and connection, yet most HCI work in human-AI co-creation centers the solo performer. As generative music matures, we ask not only what AI can compose but what social encounters it can organize around sound. We present Encypher, a collaborative generative music system that translates collective movement qualities into text prompts conditioning real-time music generation for dance cyphers. Through five weeks of co-design with local dancers, a user study with unacquainted participants, a public museum event, and a live performance, we found that users developed shared agency, perceiving the music as a response to the room's energy. While newcomers felt uncertain, the system fostered social presence by prompting them to look to each other for cues. By treating sociality as a design concern rather than a downstream effect, we offer a framework and design implications for AI systems for collaborative, embodied expression.

Zhixing Chen, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, USA

Human-AI Interaction Music Generation Human-AI Co-Creation

Sep 14, 2026cs.SD

SongCraft: Unified Song Generation and Editing with Reconstructive Learning

Song generation and editing have mostly been treated as separate tasks. Existing editing methods often require noise injection and regeneration or curated paired training data. We propose a unified approach for song generation and editing based on reconstructive pretraining, in which a model is trained to reconstruct audio from varying numbers of interpretable conditions. With conditions such as text and lyrics, the model learns to generate diverse songs. With dense conditions specifying fine-grained music attributes, the model learns to reconstruct the target and enables editing by modifying any single attribute while keeping others fixed. This leads to SongCraft, a latent flow matching based model trained for both generation and fine-grained editing. To improve song generation quality, we further introduce word-level phoneme alignment that improves pronunciation learning and accelerates convergence, beat conditioning that improves general musicality, and representation alignment on VAE latent space that produces semantically meaningful latents for improved generation quality. Experiments show that SongCraft achieves the lowest word error rate among evaluated song generation baselines while maintaining competitive audio quality. We further show that a single model can support editing of lyrics, vocal melody, beats, and singer identity, and we also study the trade-off between reconstruction quality and editability.

Haohe Liu, Varun Nagaraja, Gael Le Lan +5

Meta AI

Text-to-Music Generation Audio Editing Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Sep 14, 2026cs.SD

DiffSynth-Music: Audio-Conditioned KV-Cache Adapters for Controllable Music Generation

Text and lyrics specify broad musical characteristics and sung content but offer limited control over musical timing, melody, and reference-based style. We introduce DiffSynth-Music (https://modelscope.cn/models/DiffSynth-Studio/DiffSynth-Music), a framework that adds composable audio conditioning to a music synthesis backbone through layer-wise key-value injection. The three template models, Control, Prosody, and Reference, are initialized from the backbone diffusion transformer and trained with conditional flow matching. They support five control types: beats, vocals, accompaniment, prosody, and reference audio. A shared variational autoencoder maps conditioning waveforms into a common latent space, enabling their attention memories to be combined. With the template timestep fixed at the clean-data endpoint and other inputs held constant, each control cache is computed once and reused throughout sampling. Training pairs are derived from music recordings using beat extraction, source separation, vocal resynthesis, and reference-excerpt selection. Single-control evaluations on Mandarin and English songs demonstrate improved adherence across all five control types and better lyric fidelity under vocal conditioning relative to the backbone. Automatic music-quality and instruction-following scores remain broadly comparable to those of the evaluated base models, with metric-specific trade-offs. We release the three template models to support research and creative applications in controllable music generation.

Zhongjie Duan, Shengchuan Gao, Hong Zhang +1

Alibaba Group · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Controllable Music Generation Audio Diffusion Models Attention Control in Diffusion Models Music Generation

Sep 14, 2026cs.SD

StepAudio 3 Gen Technical Report

We introduce StepAudio 3 Gen, a general-purpose audio generation model that supports zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS), voice design, vocal generation, sound effects, music, vibe speech, and mixtures of multiple audio types within a unified framework. At its core, StepAudio 3 Gen is a discrete autoregressive generator that models audio directly over residual vector quantization (RVQ) tokens, departing from the diffusion Transformer-based continuous generation paradigm prevalent in recent general audio models. Its StepAudio Tokenizer represents general audio at 12.5 Hz in a shared

16 \times 2048

residual code space, jointly quantizing semantic and waveform-level acoustic features so that each code layer preserves both types of information. For generation, the backbone predicts the first codebook along the time axis using autoregressive modeling, while a lightweight causal Transformer completes the remaining fifteen codebooks along the codebook axis. Our study further identifies three key design principles: (1) interference-aware progressive pretraining for acquiring audio capabilities while preserving the textual abilities of the large language model, (2) RVQ Adaptor for effectively incorporating multi-codebook acoustic representations, and (3) discrete autoregressive modeling over a shared representation across general audio domains. With progressive pretraining, multi-task instruction training, and supervised fine-tuning, StepAudio 3 Gen achieves state-of-the-art performance on both TTS and voice design, while retaining strong generation capabilities across speech, vocals, sound effects, and music. Audio samples are available at https://stepaudiollm.github.io/step-audio-3-gen/.

Bin Lin, Bo Zhao, Boyang Wang +68

TTS Synthesis Zero-Shot TTS Controllable Speech Generation Music Generation Audio Generation

Sep 11, 2026cs.SD

Learned Continuous Synthesis of Quadratic Difference Tone Spectra

Quadratic difference tones (QDTs) are a species of auditory distortion product in which a "phantom" pure tone, absent from the acoustic signal, is clearly audible to listeners. Exploiting this phenomenon, one can synthesize harmonically rich tones for musical purposes, a technique called Quadratic Difference Tone Spectrum (QDTS) synthesis. Previous works have introduced numerical methods to synthesize QDTS based on the distortion function, which links a target QDTS and an overtone-structured carrier signal. While accurate, these methods were stochastic and discontinuous, making them difficult to control for musical purposes and effectively limiting them to stationary signals. This paper proposes a neural network-based approach that learns an approximate inverse of the distortion mapping in an autoencoder-like configuration, producing a continuous approximation that addresses prior limitations. Experimental results show that, although slightly less numerically precise, the method is sufficient for perceptual and musical applications. We also implement a real-time version in Max and evaluate its performance. Various sound examples demonstrate its expressive and musical potential. The source code, audio examples, tutorials, and software accompanying this work are available at https://cordutie.github.io/projects/qdts.html

Esteban Gutiérrez, Behzad Haki, Christopher Haworth +2

Department of Information and Communications Technologies Universitat Pompeu Fabra · Independent Researcher Barcelona, Spain · Department of Music University of Birmingham +1

Music Generation Audio Generation

Sep 7, 2026cs.SD

Silent Metronome: Rhythmic Grounding for Live Music Accompaniment

Live accompaniment models generate music for an incoming audio stream, committing to each output frame before hearing what comes next. In this strictly causal setting the model must infer tempo, meter, and metrical phase from its own imperfect past, whereby compounding errors quickly become audible as rhythmic drift. Put simply, the model has ears but no temporal reference, so when the ears hear imperfect, ambiguous music, the model will produce a flawed output. We propose Silent Metronome (SiMe), which gives it the temporal reference, encoding the phase within the beat and within the bar as periodic functions, pairing them with tempo and time signature, and supplying the result as a separate conditioning channel. Because this reference is independent of the generated audio, it cannot drift. Complementary auxiliary heads shape the latent representation, including a novel head that predicts the model's own future tokens. With the metrical signal taken from ground-truth annotations, beat alignment improves by a factor of 3.2 over the strictly causal baseline and surpasses a non-causal reference granted a full second of look-ahead. Coherence between input and accompaniment stays within a single point of that reference. These results suggest that streaming accompaniment systems should treat rhythm as a signal to be shared, as human ensembles do, rather than inferred.

Kevin Bretz, Derya Soydaner, Aske Plaat

Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Sep 3, 2026cs.SD

Local Chord Corruption Is Not Recognizer Replay: Structure-Matched Calibration for Chord-Conditioned Generation

Synthetic chord substitutions offer controlled tests of music generation, but their effects can differ from those of a complete recognized chord sequence. We propose structure-matched calibration, which constructs synthetic chord sequences that preserve the locations and harmonic relations of recognizer-induced changes. Paired generation measures how closely these sequences reproduce the response to complete recognizer replay. On 29 of 30 MUSDB18-HQ songs, central four-second tritone corruption produces a larger target response than complete recognizer replay. On 24 held-out MoisesDB songs, structure matching reduces response distance to replay by 81% for MIDI-SAG and 77% for MusicGen-Chord. Distance to replay decreases on every song in both models. Joint matching also brings output chord sequences closer to replay than either temporal or relational matching alone. Calibration extends to AccoMontage's native beat-based interface, improving 23 of 24 songs. These results establish a method for making synthetic chord tests representative of recognized harmony, while distinguishing response magnitude from the harmonic structure of generated music.

Weiwen Huang

Shenzhen University

Music Generation Evaluation Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 31, 2026cs.SD

VIBE: Video Instruction-aligned Background music gEneration

Current video-to-music (V2M) models lack semantic control and fail to penalize instruction violations, largely due to their reliance on reconstruction objectives and the representational bottleneck of static cross-modal conditioning in Diffusion Autoregressive (DAR) architectures. To resolve this, we introduce VIBE, a novel text-and-video-to-music (T+V2M) generation model that leverages: (1) Conditioning Connection, a depth-wise cross-layer conditioning mechanism that dynamically bridges the planning and diffusion refinement heads and (2) a comprehensive reward modeling taxonomy, optimizing for both hard, verifiable constraints (e.g., tempo, key) and soft, subjective qualities (e.g., musicality, multimodal alignment) with a structured 5-stage training curriculum. Upon evaluation using audio-visual alignment, instruction following, and audio quality metrics, along with a subjective human evaluation study, we observe that VIBE demonstrates enhanced controllability and instruction adherence while performing comparably to most evaluated baselines on generation fidelity and multimodal alignment.

Aryan Vijay Bhosale, Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Vishnu Raj +5

University of Maryland, College Park, USA · Dolby Laboratories, USA

Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 30, 2026cs.SD

How Well Do Generative Music Models Follow Emotion Conditioning?

Recent generative music models offer increasingly fine-grained control through text and audio conditioning, yet how faithfully they follow intended emotional cues remains an open question. We address this gap with a unified evaluation pipeline for emotion-following in generated music. Using all 1000 tracks in GTZAN, we extract semantic audio descriptions with DashengLM, an audio captioning model, and estimate source-track valence and arousal with Music2Emotion, a music emotion recognition model. We construct affect-aware text prompts by combining descriptions with top-ranked emotion tags and generate 30-second outputs with three systems, Stable Audio Open, MusicGen, and InspireMusic, evaluating both text- and audio-conditioned generation. To measure emotion-following, we compute valence and arousal on generated audio and compare them with the source tracks using absolute error and Euclidean distance in valence-arousal space. Text-conditioned generation consistently outperforms audio conditioning, with MusicGen (text) and InspireMusic (text) achieving the best performance, while audio-conditioned variants prove less stable. We further find that valence is preserved more reliably than arousal and that emotion-following varies substantially across genres. These findings underscore the importance of evaluating affective controllability directly rather than relying solely on general quality or prompt-relevance metrics.

Morteza Heydari

Istinye University, Graduate School, Istanbul, Turkey

Text-to-Music Generation Music Generation Evaluation Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 12, 2026cs.SD

Drive-to-Music: Context-Aware Generative Audio for In-Vehicle Experiences

In-vehicle music can serve as an adaptive interface to enhance driver experience, attention, and well-being. We present Drive-to-Music, a context-aware system that generates music in real time from multimodal driving signals. Using dashcam imagery and vehicle telemetry, the system extracts scene semantics and driving context, maps them to high-level musical descriptors, and conditions generative audio models to produce contextually aligned soundtracks. The architecture combines perception and generative components to translate visual and kinematic inputs into structured musical attributes and synthesize audio with low latency. It supports smooth transitions as driving conditions evolve, and to ensure robustness and deployment readiness, we incorporate constraint-based controls and safety checks across the generation pipeline. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of real-time, context-aware music generation in automotive settings, providing a foundation for personalized and adaptive in-vehicle audio experiences.

Cosmin Dragoiu, Nooshin Nabizadeh

Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America

Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 12, 2026cs.SD

MuseCritic: Learning Multi-Aspect Song Rewards through Natural-Language Aesthetic Critiques

Long-form song generation models continue to improve in duration, structural coherence, and acoustic complexity, increasing the need for reliable aesthetic rewards aligned with human preferences. However, reward models for complete songs remain limited, and existing evaluators typically predict scores in a single forward pass without readable explanations. To this end, we introduce MuseCritic, a semi-scalar reward model that generates a natural-language critique covering five aesthetic dimensions and uses it as an intermediate representation to predict continuous reward scores. MuseCritic follows a two-stage training pipeline: a teacher model first provides high-quality critiques for supervised fine-tuning, then the fine-tuned model generates its own critiques for reward learning, mitigating training-inference distribution shift. On an in-domain test set of 200 SongEval songs, MuseCritic reduces macro-averaged mean squared error from 0.2875 to 0.2316 and improves macro-averaged LCC, SRCC, and Kendall's tau to 0.9068, 0.8838, and 0.7178, respectively. On the out-of-domain Music Arena benchmark with 733 preference pairs, it achieves 71.35% accuracy and remains competitive with strong music-specific reward models. Using MuseCritic with GRPO also improves Muse-0.6B on all nine aesthetic metrics from SongEval and Audiobox Aesthetics. These results show that critique-conditioned reward modeling reduces scoring error and provides an effective optimization signal for song generation. The project repository is available at https://github.com/WuqnEl/MuseCritic.

Jiabao Zhuang, Changhao Jiang, Hanchen Wang +11

Fudan NLP Group, Fudan University

Music Generation Evaluation Reward Modeling Music Generation

Aug 12, 2026cs.SD

Dialogue-Aware Video-to-Music Generation Using Public Domain Film Collections

Video-to-music generation has drawn growing interest for its role in conveying the emotion of visual media, including film. Progress in the field, however, is hampered by a reproducibility gap: models are often trained on crawled corpora referenced through YouTube URLs that may be deleted, with the underlying data often difficult and time-consuming to retrieve. To address this, we introduce the Open Screen Soundtrack Library version 2 (OSSL-v2), a self-hosted corpus of 34,343 video clips totaling 246.4 hours, sourced from public-domain films. Unlike crawled corpora, OSSL-v2 is reproducible (i.e., not subject to link rot) and copyright-conscious, yet still large enough to train functional video-to-music models. We then use this film-domain corpus to study dialogue as a conditioning signal for video-to-music generation, motivated by the close temporal coupling between film music and on-screen speech. Specifically, we augment existing models' video cross-attention with a time axis and modulate it frame-by-frame with the dialogue track. Evaluated on both public-domain and commercial films, our approach shows improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/McAuley-Lab/OSSL-v2.

Haven Kim, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley +1

University of California San Diego · University of Michigan

Audio-Video Generation Music Generation

Aug 11, 2026cs.HC

MazzikaAI: A knowledge-based performance-to-prompt compiler for real-time Arabic maqam accompaniment with a streaming text-to-music model

Arabic maqam music microtonal, modal, and built on ornamented call and response is among the traditions most underserved by generative music models, whose training frameworks remain predominantly Western and equaltempered. Real time accompaniment sharpens this gap: an AI partner must listen, adapt dynamically, and respect idiomatic microtonal structures. Streaming text to music models provide strong generative capabilities but lack precise control interfaces. We present MazzikaAI, a knowledge based system that uses natural language as the actuator of a realtime control loop. By compiling live MIDI, gesture, and inferred harmony into continuously updated text prompts, MazzikaAI steers an unmodified streaming generator, Google Lyria RealTime, without requiring model finetuning. The system embeds expert knowledge of six core maqamat, characteristic ornaments, and ensemble dynamics, maintaining realtime responsiveness with subsecond keytoaudibleupdate latency. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that dynamic prompt compilation reliably grounds generation in microtonal scales, significantly increasing offgrid quartertone content over baseline generation. Beyond its core implementation, MazzikaAI illustrates how deterministic knowledgebased rules can effectively bridge expert, nonWestern musical traditions and unfinetuned foundation models. This architecture establishes a scalable paradigm for realtime humanAI cocreation, offering a generalizable blueprint for interactive accompaniment, adaptive music education, and culturally inclusive generative audio across diverse global idioms.

Jiaxin Du, Boulbaba Abdeljaouad, Yong Zhuang +1

aGrand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, USA

Text-to-Music Generation Prompt Learning Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 10, 2026cs.SD

RAG-Audio: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Faithful Brain-to-Audio Reconstruction

Brain-to-audio reconstruction is limited by \emph{prior domination}: when a pretrained generator is conditioned on a weak neural signal, it produces realistic but stimulus-inaccurate audio. We introduce RAG-Audio, which decodes fMRI into a semantic audio embedding, retrieves a matching real-audio exemplar, and initializes the frozen generator's sampling trajectory from that exemplar while retaining the decoded embedding as conditioning. On Brain2Music, RAG-Audio improves 10-way stimulus identification from

0.14

--

0.18

for direct generation, near the

0.10

chance level, to

0.40

--

0.43

, comparable to retrieval. It also reduces Fréchet Audio Distance by roughly an order of magnitude, from

13.49

to

1.25

for AudioLDM. RAG-Audio approaches nearest-neighbor retrieval in identification while remaining generative; its higher FAD is expected because retrieval directly replays real audio. An autoregressive negative control, which lacks an initializable latent trajectory, shows no comparable gain, attributing the improvement to trajectory initialization. These results suggest that retrieval-guided initialization can mitigate prior domination in brain-to-audio generation.

Ambuj Mehrish, Sebastiano Vascon

CVML Lab · Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Neural Decoding Music Generation Audio Generation

Aug 5, 2026cs.SD

Diff-Symbo: Text-Controlled Long-Duration Symbolic Music Generation Using Autoregressive Latent Diffusion Model

Text-controlled symbolic music generation has recently gained research attention due to its versatile, flexible and straightforward approach to music composition. However, previous approaches tend to generate symbolic music with compromising quality, diversity, controllability and limited duration. In this paper, we present Diff-Symbo, an innovative method that uses latent diffusion model (LDM) to generate high-quality, diverse and long-duration symbolic music. To address the lack of text-symbolic music dataset, we develop a comprehensive dataset with 19,345 text templates by employing large language model. Furthermore, we design a music information encoder to reduce the training overhead while extracting more effective control representations. Given textual descriptions, our proposed method leverages LDM to improve the quality and diversity of music generation. Our method also improves the duration and the compositional consistency of music generation through an autoregressive approach. Experimental results show significant improvements of Diff-Symbo in text controllability, duration, and the quality of generated music compared to the baseline models such as GPT-4, MuseCoco and Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT). As one of the pioneer models in this field, Diff-Symbo paves the way towards controllable and high-quality symbolic music composition based on LDM, offering valuable contributions to both music amateurs and practitioners.

Zhiwei Lin, Jun Chen, Boshi Tang +5

Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China · Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Text-to-Music Generation Latent Diffusion Models Controllable Music Generation Symbolic Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 4, 2026cs.SD

InvFlowFD: Reference-Free and Background-Set-Free Perceptual Music Quality Metric with Flow Matching Inversion

Existing reference-free methods for evaluating music perceptual quality alleviate the need for paired noisy-clean data, but they still rely on a background set, which is used to compute aggregated statistics of clean audio samples. In this work, we propose a novel approach that eliminates this requirement, achieving background-set-free and reference-free quality estimation using only a pre-trained Flow Matching backbone. We demonstrate that unconditional Flow Matching inversion via simple Euler integration is sufficient to detect various artificial distortions and accurately rank music generation models against human perceptual judgments. We introduce InvFlowFD, which performs flow inversion and compares a group of inverted samples to the prior distribution. We evaluate our method against prior work, quantitatively and with a thorough human study. Results suggest that InvFlowFD is highly correlated with human perception of sound distortions, as well as generative models' quality, while being more flexible and less restrictive than existing metrics.

Alon Ziv, Harel Pogoda, Yossi Adi

School of Computer Science and Engineering The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Music Generation Evaluation Music Generation Generative AI Evaluation

Aug 4, 2026cs.SD

Learning Music Style for Piano Arrangement Through Cross-Modal Bootstrapping

What is music style? Though often described using text labels such as "swing," "classical," or "emotional," the real style remains implicit and hidden in concrete music examples. In this paper, we introduce a cross-modal framework that learns implicit music styles from raw audio and applies them to symbolic music generation. Inspired by BLIP-2, our model leverages a Querying Transformer (Q-Former) to extract style representations from a large, pre-trained audio language model (LM), and further applies them to condition a symbolic LM for generating piano arrangements. We adopt a two-stage training strategy: contrastive learning to align auditory style with symbolic expression, followed by generative modeling for music arrangement. Our model generates piano performances jointly conditioned on a lead sheet (content) and a reference audio example (style), enabling controllable and stylistically faithful arrangement. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in piano cover generation, style transfer, and audio-to-MIDI retrieval, achieving substantial improvements in style-aware alignment and music quality.

Jingwei Zhao, Gus Xia, Ziyu Wang +1

1Songscription · School of Computing, National University of Singapore · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) +1

Controllable Music Generation Cross-Modal Alignment Symbolic Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 4, 2026cs.SD

Calliphony: A Calligraphy-Driven Interface for Real-Time Generative Music Performance

While music generative models have recently gained significant attention, how they can be effectively integrated into live music performances still requires further exploration. This paper presents Calliphony, a calligraphy-driven interface for real-time generative music performance. Specifically, we build a low-latency pipeline that captures brush motion with an attachable sensor and maps it to control signals for real-time symbolic music generation. Using a generative model, the system produces multi-track MIDI in performance settings, while brush-derived control signals constrain event timing and activate additional musical layers. The generated melody is then extended with real-time harmony and additional voices, and finally rendered through a DAW for live staging. Calliphony contributes: (1) a performance-oriented prototype that uses calligraphic motion as an external control layer for a real-time symbolic music generation model, controlling note density, pitch constraints, and accompaniment-layer activation; and (2) a cross-modal performance scenario that extends calligraphy beyond a primarily visual practice into an audiovisual, AI-assisted setting.

Tristan Wu, Ruiji Yu, Gus Xia

Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Aug 3, 2026cs.SD

P-MUSE: Prompt-MIDI-Optional Model for Unified Instrumental Music Synthesis and Editing

MIDI-to-Music system renders the melody and rhythm of a target MIDI sequence into musical segment while cloning instrument timbre from a prompt recording. Existing systems typically adopt one of two distinct paradigms: conditional generation with prompt audio alone, which remains applicable when aligned prompt MIDI is unavailable, and In-Context Learning with paired prompt audio and MIDI, which exploits cross-modal alignment for stronger control on MIDI following and timbre similarity. We introduce P-MUSE, an instrumental MIDI-to-Music framework that unifies both paradigms via a multi-stage Curriculum-Learning supporting prompt-MIDI-optional inputs. P-MUSE further unifies music generation and local editing through a shared fill-in-the-middle formulation. Grounded in theoretical analysis and empirical study, we propose a phase-aware classifier-free guidance scheduling principle for Transcription-to-Audio systems, alongside a Tail-Drop strategy. Finally, to advance research in this field, we establish the first comprehensive benchmark, covering various prompt modes, generation/editing tasks, and four representative instruments: piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Demos are available at https://p-muse.github.io/.

Chong Jing, Junan Zhang, Jing Yang +3

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shen Zhen · Central Media Technology Institute, Huawei

Audio Editing Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Jul 29, 2026cs.SD

MPEcho: A Melody and Phoneme-Aware Generative Framework for Controllable Cover Song Generation

Cover song generation (CSG) should preserve the melodic and linguistic content of a reference song while recreating the remaining musical components. The state-of-the-art model SongEcho utilizes

F_0

sequences and voiced/unvoiced (V/UV) tags for conditioning; however, implicit linguistic information from V/UV tags cannot guarantee lyric accuracy, leading to a high phoneme error rate (PER). Inspired by singing voice synthesis (SVS), we propose MPEcho, which integrates a phoneme encoder and a length regulator (LR) into the SongEcho framework. By providing explicit phoneme-level conditioning and precise temporal boundaries, MPEcho significantly reduces PER. To enable this, we developed Phonsa, a Whisper-based automatic transcription model that provides high-precision phoneme-level annotations for singing voices, overcoming the scarcity of high-quality audio-phoneme pairs. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of Phonsa for alignment and MPEcho for end-to-end CSG. The audio samples, code and weights can be accessed from https://lonian6.github.io/MPEcho.github.io/.

Wei-Jaw Lee, Hsuan-Yu Yeh, Ting-Yi Hu +3

GICE, National Taiwan University

Controllable Music Generation Music Generation

Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

MusiChat: Vibe Composing for Music Creation

Recent advances in AI music generation have enabled users to create complete musical pieces from natural-language prompts. However, most existing systems follow a prompt-and-regenerate paradigm, making iterative refinement difficult because users must repeatedly recreate compositions instead of directly evolving existing musical ideas. We present MusiChat, a conversational vibe composing system that enables collaborative human-AI music creation through natural-language interaction and iterative refinement. At the core of MusiChat is a hierarchical controllable music generation framework that separates lyric-aligned musical structure generation from expressive surface realization, allowing flexible stylistic transformations and structure-preserving edits. The system integrates a large language model with a hybrid symbolic music engine through a memory-augmented architecture that maintains the active composition state and user history across interactions. A hybrid intent-routing mechanism further enables efficient interpretation of both precise musical edits and open-ended creative requests. Rather than regenerating compositions from scratch, MusiChat incrementally transforms an evolving musical artifact while preserving relevant musical structure and user intent. We evaluate MusiChat through objective analysis and human studies, achieving 95.31% and 100% accuracy for single- and multi-turn interactions, respectively, and obtaining like-to-dislike ratios of 2:1 for melody naturalness and 3:1 for musical quality. Our results demonstrate that MusiChat supports coherent multi-turn music authoring and interactive human-AI co-creation through a conversational interface.

Callie C. Liao, Duoduo Liao, Ellie L. Zhang

George Mason University Fairfax, VA · IntelliSky McLean, VA

Controllable Music Generation Symbolic Music Generation Music Generation Human-AI Co-Creation

Jul 25, 2026cs.SD

Infinite Canons: Maximally Self-Similar Melodic Lines and Canons with Infinite Solutions

Infinite Canons is an ongoing series of canons with infinite solutions. More specifically, each canon is based on a melodic line that can be combined in any number of voices, at any tempo ratios (rational or irrational), and with each voice moving either forward or in retrograde inversion, while maintaining harmonic consistency. This paper describes the structure of these maximally self-similar melodic lines based on two different constructions: 1) a discrete prime-factorization approach yielding self-similarity under all rational ratios, and 2) a continuous logarithmic approach extending this to irrational ratios. In both cases the vertical interval between voices in a tempo ratio of

λ_i / λ_j

is given by a homomorphism

φ(λ_i / λ_j)

, which is a constant independent of time. Furthermore, under these constructions retrograde inversion collapses to transposition, allowing for all manner of table canons. These structures are demonstrated with suggestive realizations of several different infinite canons. Future work includes a more complete mathematical treatment, musical applications, and an interactive program that allows users to explore an unlimited number of realizations of these pieces.

Clifton Callender

Florida State University

Music Generation

Jul 22, 2026cs.SD

Pushing the Frontier of Full-Song Generation: Hierarchical Autoregressive Planning Meets Flow-Matching Rendering

In this report, we present a unified song generation framework capable of producing high-quality full-length music from lyrics, text descriptions, and musical attributes. The proposed framework supports three tasks: Lyrics-to-Song Generation, which generates complete songs from text descriptions, lyrics, and musical attributes; Instrumental Music Generation, which creates music without vocals; and Cover Song Generation, which reinterprets existing songs with different styles while preserving their melodic content. Architecturally, our system consists of four main components: a semantic-aware tokenizer, hybird-LM, FullDiT, and a two-level melody module. The tokenizer encodes audio into 8-codebook RVQ tokens for efficient discrete music representation. Based on these tokens, hybird-LM performs hierarchical autoregressive audio-token modeling for full-song generation. To improve audio fidelity, FullDiT performs full-song flow matching in a continuous VAE latent space conditioned on codec tokens, lyrics, and text captions. For cover song generation, the melody module extracts and discretizes melody cues from reference audio to guide generation while preserving the original melodic content. Finally, we investigate DPO, GRPO, and OPD as reward-based post-training strategies for hybird-LM and apply flow-based GRPO to FullDiT to improve musicality and rendering quality. Experimental results on a multilingual automatic benchmark, complemented by the Artificial Analysis Music with Vocals leaderboard, show that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance in the evaluated settings.

Junyu Dai, Xinyue Fan, Weiqin Li +14

Alibaba Token Foundry

Text-to-Music Generation Music Generation Autoregressive Generation

Jul 22, 2026cs.SD

RPPNet: Perceptually-Grouped Rhythm-Pitch Primitives for Long-Term Structure Melody Generation via Boundary-Aware Modeling

Existing symbolic music generation models typically use bars as the basic structural unit. However, human perception of musical phrases often does not align with notated bar lines, leading to long-term structural fragmentation. This paper proposes RPPNet-a two-stage deep learning architecture with variable structural boundaries. It first generates variable-length Rhythm-Pitch Primitive (RPP) sequences, where each RPP encodes note count, rhythm, and contour; then decodes the RPP sequences into concrete notes. The grouping of RPPs is automatically derived from acoustic cues, auditory inertia, and similarity perception based on music psychology. Experiments show that melodies generated by RPPNet are superior in both long-term structure and musicality, with significant improvements across all subjective evaluation dimensions. Ablation studies confirm that the performance gain stems from the structural correctness of the psychological representation, rather than from model capacity. This work offers an interdisciplinary perspective for music generation, integrating music theory, computational modeling, and music psychology.

Tieyao Zhang, Yuke Liu, Jiaxing Yu +3

Zhejiang Conservatory of Music, Hangzhou, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · ZJU-ZJCM MusicAI Lab, Hangzhou, China

Symbolic Music Generation Music Generation