Music Generation

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8 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Music Generation.

Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Music Generation.

Period ending 2026-09-07

3 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Music Generation.

102 papers

Latest in Music Generation

Sep 22, 2026cs.SD

A Stem-Agnostic Approach to Hybrid AI Music Detection

The inclusion of generative audio in the music production process has led to an increase in hybrid music tracks that blend authentic human performances with AI-generated stems, challenging traditional AI music detectors which operate in a binary setting. In this work, we propose a stem-agnostic framework for identifying synthetic audio sources within hybrid musical mixtures. We introduce the inspectrogram, a novel time-frequency representation that maps localized probabilities of synthetic content across the audio spectrum. By combining the inspectrogram with a Wiener filter estimating target stem energy dominance, a single CNN model evaluates whether the specific stem is generated. Trained on rendered hybrid mixtures and evaluated across various stem classes, our model achieves strong performance on high-frequency sources such as vocals, drums, and guitar, but struggles on the low-frequency, narrow-band bass. We conclude that the quality of separation impacts the detection accuracy and identify source separation as a primary bottleneck and a crucial direction for future research.
Richa Namballa, François Rigaud, Romain Hennequin
Sep 16, 2026cs.SD

TTM-Bench: A Framework for Text-to-Music System Performance Benchmarking

Text-to-music (TTM) systems are increasingly used to generate musical audio from natural-language descriptions. Robust evaluation is therefore essential, yet reliable performance comparison remains challenging. This difficulty stems from differences in system architecture, supported conditioning information, and access mode, as well as heterogeneous and fragmented metrics that cannot be applied uniformly across systems. To address these challenges, we introduce TTM-Bench, a framework that defines a common protocol for systematic, reproducible performance benchmarking of contemporary TTM systems. It evaluates performance along two dimensions: musical-content alignment, quantified by interpretable semantic, genre, and musical-descriptor agreement scores against a common musical specification and summarized by an aggregate score; and computational efficiency, characterized by generation latency and real-time factor, alongside resource use for local models and cost for hosted services. We demonstrate the framework through a preliminary comparative case study, illustrating the complementary evidence captured by these dimensions. The results show that higher musical-content alignment does not systematically coincide with lower computational demands, highlighting the importance of assessing TTM performance through distinct, interpretable measures rather than a reductive overall indicator.
Giorgia Adorni, Michela Papandrea, Battista Rimoldi +1
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
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
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
Sep 1, 2026cs.SD

TUTTI: Toward generalizable audio-to-score transcription via fully synthesized data

Generalizable Audio-to-Score (A2S) transcription is fundamentally constrained by the severe scarcity of high-quality, real-world paired data. Relying solely on existing human-annotated datasets often restricts the generalization of A2S models, limiting their efficacy primarily to single-instrumentation domains. To break this dependency on scarce real-world data, we introduce TUTTI (Transformer for Unified audio-To-score Transcription trained on Synthetic multi-Instrumentation Data), a pre-training paradigm driven by a purely synthetic, large-scale dataset. Rather than using human-composed scores, we leverage a symbolic music generation model to generate a massive, highly scalable multi-instrumentation corpus and create audio-score pairs with expressive acoustic characteristics. Capitalizing on the generated data, we employ a standard Transformer encoder-decoder architecture. We empirically demonstrate that pre-training a unified attention-based model on generated, multi-instrumentation data yields a consistently stronger foundational representation than single-instrumentation training. When fine-tuned with downstream real-world datasets, TUTTI outperforms previous approaches, establishing new overall state-of-the-art results across various A2S baselines. Notably, TUTTI shows remarkable cross-instrument transferability, effectively adapting to unseen instruments with highly competitive performance. The source code and the TuttiCorpus dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/a-musiclover/TUTTI.
Jianhuai Hu, Yashan Wang, Shangda Wu +7
Aug 31, 2026cs.SD

MusGU+: Toward a Musician-Centered Evaluation Framework and Discovery Tool for Generative Music AI

Generative music systems are increasingly presented as tools that democratize music creation, yet their practical suitability for musicians remains underexplored. Prior work includes openness-focused evaluation frameworks, such as MusGO (Music-Generative Open AI), as well as qualitative studies of musicians' experiences with generative systems. However, these approaches do not support systematic comparison or early-stage discovery of models for creative use. Motivated by such limitations, we introduce MusGU+, a musician-centered evaluation framework organized around three dimensions: Adaptability, Usability, and Controllability. Together, these capture whether a model can be feasibly trained or fine-tuned on personal data, integrated into real-world music workflows, and controlled in musically meaningful ways. We evaluate 10 representative generative music systems and present an interactive discovery tool that enables musicians to explore and filter models according to these criteria. While MusGO remains valuable for promoting responsible research practices, MusGU+ supports informed selection and practical adoption of generative systems by musicians.
Laura Ibáñez-Martínez, Roser Batlle-Roca, Xavier Serra +1
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
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
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
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

From Visual Widgets to UI Code: Efficient Tool-Grounded Generation

Existing screenshot-to-code systems face a trade-off between flexibility and controllability. Direct multimodal generation can hallucinate visible details, whereas structured pipelines reduce such errors through component-wise decomposition, predefined templates, and customized intermediate representations. These structures, however, introduce additional generative orchestration and restrict outputs to designs covered by the representation. We investigate whether selective tool grounding can improve the fidelity--efficiency trade-off of direct widget-to-code generation. We introduce \textbf{WidgetGen}, a lightweight tool-grounded framework that extracts observable text and color evidence, performs high-level layout and optional chart reasoning, and directly generates executable JavaScript XML (\emph{JSX}). This design reduces reliance on component-wise generation while avoiding a fixed UI schema. Across six multimodal models and 1,0001{,}000 held-out widgets, WidgetGen outperforms direct prompting and the structured Widget2Code pipeline on most visual reconstruction metrics, with consistent gains in area, legibility, and style. Finally, reconstruction-derived image-code pairs improve six Qwen-family open-weight models across every reported metric through supervised fine-tuning. These results establish WidgetGen as a strong lightweight baseline and show that selective evidence grounding offers an effective alternative to extensive representation constraints.
Houston H. Zhang, Tao Zhang, Li Gu +5
Aug 12, 2026cs.SD

Do Text-to-Music Models Really Follow Instructions? A Counterfactual Evaluation of Key and Beat Grouping

Prompted attribute agreement is widely used as evidence of text-to-music controllability, yet a requested attribute may occur simply because it is already common in the model's output distribution. We introduce a matched counterfactual evaluation that separates target occurrence from instruction-attributable control. Each family contains a neutral input that omits the scored attribute and two otherwise matched inputs that swap the requested target. All three are rendered through frozen native-interface adapters with a shared seed. Applied to global key and beat grouping in three open systems, this design changes the empirical conclusion. ACE-Step 1.5 and Stable Audio 3 Medium exhibit substantial key control, whereas LeVo2 does not. For beat grouping, the same models redirect toward the rare three-beat target, but high four-beat agreement is largely inherited from neutral outputs: Stable Audio 3 produces four-beat grouping in 0.97 of neutral cases but only 0.56 under its explicit four-beat treatment. Off-attribute placebos, external recognizer validation, blind expert annotation, and multi-seed sentinels support the attribution. When targets have unequal output priors, agreement describes what a model produced, while matched neutral and target-swap contrasts test whether the instruction changed it.
Yining Wang
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
Aug 10, 2026cs.SD

MusicLayout: Explicit Structural Planning for Controllable Text-to-Music Generation

Text-to-music generation has advanced rapidly, but current systems still rely primarily on global text prompts, leaving the structural organization of generated music implicit and difficult to inspect, control, or revise before audio generation. To address this issue, we introduce MusicLayout, an explicit intermediate representation for controlling musical structure in text-to-music generation. MusicLayout describes a musical piece as a time-aligned layout of sections, textures, repetitions, variations, and instrument-level arrangements, serving as an interpretable planning layer between textual intent and the generated music. We integrate MusicLayout into a text-to-music framework built on a unified autoregressive formulation, where the model first generates a MusicLayout representation and subsequently predicts audio tokens conditioned on this representation within a single sequence. The resulting MusicLayout can be inspected and modified prior to audio generation, providing a mechanism for layout-level structural control. We evaluate MusicLayout through layout-conditioned generation, layout manipulation experiments, and matched-data ablations, providing evidence that explicit layout planning can improve long-range structural organization and support layout-level control.
Shuyu Li, Kejun Zhang, Jiahe Lei +5
Aug 7, 2026eess.AS

Assessing AI-generated music detection in real-world broadcast monitoring

The proliferation of AI-generated music in broadcast media raises concerns about transparency and fair compensation, but reliable detection under real broadcast conditions remains unresolved. Existing studies report substantial performance degradation in this domain, yet their evaluations are limited to synthetic broadcast data. To address this gap, we introduce BAMM (Broadcast AI-Music Monitoring), a 40-hour dataset of real-world television recordings containing AI-generated and human-made music. We compare clean-trained and broadcast-trained CNN variants across three progressively more challenging scenarios: Clean Foreground Music (CFM), Synthetic TV Broadcast (STB), and Real TV Broadcast (RTB). Both models achieve near-perfect performance on CFM but degrade substantially under synthetic broadcast conditions. Broadcast-oriented training improves robustness compared with clean training, although performance remains limited. On RTB, evaluated using BAMM, both models degrade further and show substantial score overlap between AI-generated and human-made music. These results expose a critical domain gap and show that current training approaches on CNN-based detectors remain insufficient for reliable AI-generated music detection in broadcast monitoring.
David López-Ayala, Fernando García de la Cruz, Pablo Zinemanas +2
Aug 6, 2026cs.SD

MI-MIDI: Mechanistic Interpretability of Text-to-MIDI Generation Models via Probing, Lenses and Steering

Mechanistic interpretability of music generation has concentrated on audio models, leaving symbolic models largely unexplored. We analyze two public text-to-MIDI systems of contrasting design: the purpose-built encoder--decoder text2midi and MIDI-LLM, a Llama3.21B model extended with MIDI tokens using linear probing, the logit and tuned lenses, activation patching and difference-in-means steering. Across these methods, we recover musically meaningful structure and show how architecture shapes its formation and control. Pitch, instrumentation, harmony and texture are linearly decodable in both models. text2midi refines predictions gradually across depth, whereas MIDI-LLM works largely in its inherited textual basis before a sharp late rotation into the musical vocabulary; patching identifies a matching late attenuation of prompt-driven instrument transfer. Steering produces bidirectional changes in register and polyphony in both systems, and in tempo/energy in MIDI-LLM. Our two-orientation protocol isolates directional control and shows that all-layer interventions are robust in text2midi but accumulate disruptively in MIDI-LLM. Together, the results provide a practical toolkit for tracing and controlling musical concepts in symbolic generators. Audio examples are available on a demo website.
Jakub Poćwiardowski, Mateusz Modrzejewski
Aug 6, 2026cs.SD

From Prompting to Describing: A Cross-Cultural Study of Language for AI-Generated Music

Text-to-music (TTM) generation systems allow users to create music through natural language prompts, yet it is unclear whether the descriptive language used to prompt aligns with descriptive language used to summarize or describe heard music. We pair 200 real-world Udio prompts with their generated audio and free-form descriptions collected from English- (n = 70) and Korean-speaking (n = 78) listeners, and contribute a human-derived taxonomy of musical prompting vocabulary grounded in real user data. Using this framework, alongside word- and vector-level analyses, we find a consistent structural asymmetry: prompts are dominated by Genre and Story/Narrative language. Genre terms propagate most reliably from prompt to perception, while narrative-heavy prompts are the strongest predictor of semantic misalignment. A preliminary cross-cultural comparison further suggests that description profiles vary across listener populations along narrative, functional, and affective dimensions, raising questions about whether current TTM systems, trained on aggregated English-centric corpora, can accommodate the full diversity of how people naturally express musical ideas.
Sangheon Park, Claire Arthur
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
Aug 5, 2026cs.SD

Helping Music Co-Creation Agents 'Listen' Well: Hierarchical Self-Supervised World Models for Understanding and Generation

Collaborative music agents need internal representations rich enough to support both understanding and generation, yet flexible enough for a workflow where the human retains agency. We present a hierarchical self-supervised ``world model'' for symbolic music: a 2.55M-parameter Swin V2 encoder trained on MIDI piano-roll images with JEPA-style objectives (pitch- and time-shift equivariance, masked embedding prediction, and a distributional regularizer), using no labels and no music-theory vocabulary. Probing the frozen embeddings shows that the level at which a musical property becomes decodable tracks its musical time scale: phrase boundaries are read off the coarsest levels, note density and harmonic detail off the finest. Temporal and phrase structure emerge from the self-supervised objectives alone, while harmonic content must be asked for; a small chord-supervision head raises joint chord recovery from .18 to .54, and key detection, which is never supervised, from .16 to .70. Following the Representation AutoEncoder paradigm, a conditional flow-matching model stands in for a trained decoder, flowing in pixel space from PCA-reduced conditioning: it reproduces a target window at pixel F1 0.9960.996, and the same per-level conditioning dropout that controls how far variations stray also enables graphical prompting for masked inpainting with no inpainting-specific sampler. The pipeline runs on CPU producing a suggestion in 2.82.8 s, or 0.60.6 s on Apple MPS, which we demonstrate in a live interactive demo. In concert with an LLM-based brain, these capabilities supply the core of a collaborative music creation agent in service of, rather than in place of, human agency.
Scott H. Hawley
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
Aug 4, 2026cs.HC

Cross-cultural evaluation of taste-sound correspondences in AI-generated music

Sonic seasoning research has shown that listeners attribute systematic gustatory and emotional meaning to sound, and text-to-music generative artificial intelligence has recently been used to render gustatory prompts as musical stimuli. Whether the taste-sound correspondences acquired by such models hold beyond the cultural context in which they were validated remains untested. We extended a single-country study to a three-country online experiment conducted in Argentina, Italy, and Japan (N = 361). Participants first indicated their preference between base and fine-tuned MusicGen excerpts generated from four taste prompts (sweet, sour, bitter, salty), and then rated fine-tuned excerpts on twelve taste, emotion, and thermal descriptors. Preference for the fine-tuned model was confirmed in Argentina and Italy but not in Japan, and the salty prompt yielded the weakest correspondence in all three cohorts. Ratings differed substantially between countries, yet the main effect of country was no longer detectable once ratings had been standardized within participant, whereas the interactions characterizing the mapping of prompts onto descriptors remained essentially unchanged. Much of the apparent cross-cultural divergence is therefore attributable to differences in scale use; a structural component nevertheless persists. In addition an exploratory factor analysis indicated that the twelve descriptors were organized along different latent dimensions in each cohort. These results indicate that cross-cultural variation in AI-mediated sonic seasoning operates at two levels: the overall level at which taste is attributed to a given stimulus, and the relational structure of those attributions. Evaluations of generative music systems across populations should accordingly distinguish response-style bias from genuine perceptual reorganization.
Matteo Spanio, Massimiliano Zampini, Luisa Torri +5
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
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
Jul 29, 2026cs.SD

Improved Robustness in AI-Generated Music Detection

AI music generators leave predictable spectral artifacts determined by their architecture. Existing detectors exploit these artifacts with near-perfect accuracy on raw generated tracks, but their performance collapses under simple audio manipulations, such as speed modification or pitch shifting. We address this open robustness problem by introducing a frequency-scaling-invariant detection pipeline that aims to prevent this kind of attack by design. Our method maps audio onto a log-frequency axis via a log-STFT remapping. A single learned cross-correlation filter, combined with max-pooling, provides shift invariance at inference time. Training uses a hybrid loss that jointly supervises binary detection and artifact-peak localization, regularizing boundary weights. Because robustness to speed change is built in by design, the detector is also interpretable: it outputs both a binary decision and an estimate of the applied speed-change factor.
Emile Dugelay, Thomas Barand, Aurélien Laouar +3
Jul 29, 2026cs.SD

Detection of AI-generated stems within hybrid human-AI music

This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first study on detecting human-AI hybrid music tracks created by mixing human-produced and AI-generated stems. Building on recent work showing that AI music detectors can identify decoder-related artifacts in fully generated music, we investigate whether such artifacts remain detectable at the stem level after mixing. Using MUSDB18-HQ database in a two-stem vocals + accompaniment setting, we simulate hybrid mixtures by autoencoding individual stems with a neural codec. We compare two strategies combining AI-generated mix detection and source separation. A naive sequential pipeline, where source separation is followed by detection on separated sources, confirms that artifacts associated with an AI-generated stem are not reliably recovered by generic source separation systems. We therefore propose a parallel architecture in which source separation is only used to estimate source-relative energy within the mixture. We then train simple stem-specific binary classifiers that take as input the generated mix prediction together with the relative energy of the target stem on short audio chunks. Averaging chunk-level predictions yields encouraging track-level results, highlighting the potential of such approaches for detecting AI-generated stems in hybrid music.
François Rigaud, Gabriel Meseguer-Brocal, Benjamin Martin +1
Jul 28, 2026cs.SD

Finding the noise: Zero-shot AI Music Detection

We present a novel method for AI-generated music detection in scenarios where the models that generated the input samples are unknown to the detector (e.g., from a newly released service). Since 2023, there has been a multiplication of user-friendly AI-music generation services (e.g., Suno, Udio), along with regular updates and new features. There is thus a need to address synthetic content detection in an unsupervised way to adapt to this rapidly changing context. This angle has not been much studied in music yet. We propose to study two tasks. First, discriminating between real and synthetic music. This may be approached in a one-class manner, namely, using some baseline real music and trying to determine what falls outside. Second, zero-shot multi-class identification, which is more similar to an unsupervised clustering task on a mix of real and various AI-music generations, where the goal is to create coherent, high-purity clusters. We propose a combination of a previously proposed artifact-extraction method, on top of which we apply non-negative matrix factorization and simple classification and clustering methods. We achieve excellent performance on both tasks, showing that the proposed methods may be used to monitor large-scale catalogs that may receive AI-generated samples from various newly released generative models.
Darius Afchar, Romain Hennequin
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
Jul 25, 2026cs.HC

Explainable AI through the Lens of Material Agency: Enabling Musical Interface Design with Neural Audio Models

Recent work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) increasingly treats AI models as design materials that have distinctive computational properties to shape design artifacts. Artists learn to work with the model "at play" to explore their emerging properties. The aim of explainability, in this view, is to make visible a crafting and hacking space to enable sustained creative practices with AI. In this chapter, we propose material explainability as a range of activities and artifacts that transform AI models into accessible and inclusive design materials in the workspace of artists, designers, and makers. We present a case study of building a repository of resources to enable artistic explorations of neural audio models in New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) design. Reflecting on our community-building journey and the making of a collection of musical interface designs with a group of artists, we raise three recommendations on enabling the exploration of AI as materials in artistic practices to inspire future XAI design for artists.
Shuoyang Jasper Zheng, Anna Xambó Sedó, Nick Bryan-Kinns
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
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
Jul 21, 2026cs.SD

RIME: Enabling Large-Scale Agentic Music Post-Production

Almost every piece of recorded music you have ever heard was modified before it reached you; commercial releases rarely spring fully-formed from the mind of a musician. Despite the promise of music generation models for one-shot output, such fine-grained iterative refinement workflows are a complementary problem, and largely out of their reach. There is also a gap for musicians: while they can express what they want to hear, not all have the facility with studio production tools to implement the complex set of actions needed to realize these intuitions. We formalize this task as agentic post-production, wherein individual aspects of a song are targeted, refined, and combined into a final track. We argue the bottleneck is data: existing corpora do not reflect how realistic post-production chains map onto the vocabulary musicians and engineers actually use. We argue there is a language for modifying recorded music that is dense, consistent, and learnable. We introduce the Rule-based Instructions for Music Editing (RIME) framework, which generates realistic paired edit-instruction data from any baseline music dataset grounded in canonical methods, design patterns, and constraints derived from real production workflows. RIME leverages POEMS, a new toolkit that combines stem separation, mixing, and common studio effects for use by multimodal agents. We use RIME and POEMS to generate 3,000 pairs of edit instructions and ground truth audio, and use this data to evaluate existing multimodal LLMs as agents on this task, showing persistent challenges in current models' post-production capabilities. We also demonstrate RIME's ability to improve post-production agent performance via supervised fine-tuning. We see RIME as an early step toward iterative musical agents, collaborative systems that could transform music production much as interactive coding agents have reshaped software engineering.
Noah Schaffer, Nikhil Singh
Jul 21, 2026quant-ph

Teleportation Game: Quantum Teleportation in Multi-Agent Systems for Interactive Music

This paper introduces an interactive music system with quantum musical agents that communicate by teleporting quantum states to one another. Human performers interact in real time with agents whose melodic and rhythmic behaviours are encoded as quantum states using Single Qubit Probability Amplitude Modulation (SQPAM) and structured through Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE). Up to three agents are combined within a single quantum circuit, with directed communication via quantum teleportation. We are interested in supporting ambiguous, transformative interactions reminiscent of free Jazz improvisation. Therefore, rather than treating noise and decoherence as limitations, the system embraces NISQ-era constraints as creative affordances, framing agent communication as quantum whispers, that is, deliberate, musically expressive imperfections in state transfer. We provide demonstrations and analyses based on melodic correlation, pitch-set distance, and state fidelity, where a continuum between imitation and divergence can be observed. We developed a tunable interpretation method to assess how agents reinterpret teleported states. This work positions teleportation as a promising interaction mechanism for agent-based quantum computer music and outlines future directions toward distributed ensembles connected via the Quantum Internet.
Eduardo Reck Miranda, Scott Yeiichi Oshiro
Jul 16, 2026eess.AS

WanSong v1.0 Technical Report

Music generation foundation models have recently attracted significant industry attention. However, achieving efficient generation and high-fidelity long-form audio while supporting controllability remains challenging. To address these needs, we present \textbf{WanSong}, a simple yet powerful approach for long-form, commercial-grade song generation. Unlike autoregressive (AR) and cascaded multi-stage pipelines (\eg, AR followed by diffusion), \textbf{WanSong} is a pure diffusion-based model that directly generates high-fidelity, multilingual songs up to 5 minutes and outputs dual stems (vocals and background music) in a single run. In addition, our diffusion framework enables faster inference through step-distillation, and offers an efficient pathway for fine-tuning and customization to support downstream editing tasks.
Binghui Chen, Pandeng Li, Yu Liu +1
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

Music-to-Dance Generation via Atomic Movements

Music-driven dance generation aims to produce human motion that is both rhythmically synchronized and semantically consistent with music. While recent neural approaches have achieved impressive visual realism, they typically model motion as a continuous signal and neglect its compositional nature, making generated dances structurally incoherent and difficult to control. In this work, we introduce a structure-aware framework that models choreography as a sequence of atomic movements-semantically interpretable motion events that serve as the building blocks of dance. To construct this atomic movement vocabulary, we first segment large-scale dance data and cluster them into atomic movement groups. We then employ a large language model to semantically relabel and refine the clusters, yielding a set of interpretable and reusable atomic movements. Based on these atomic movement annotations, we design a two-stage generation framework that mirrors the human choreography process. In the atomic movement planning stage, the model predicts the type, duration, and timing of atomic movements conditioned on the input music, forming a symbolic dance allocation. In the completion stage, a transition-aware generator synthesizes smooth and stylistically coherent motion conditioned on the planned structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces dances with significantly improved structural coherence, rhythmic alignment, and perceptual naturalness compared to existing baselines, while providing enhanced interpretability and controllable editing through explicit structural representation.
Xinhao Cai, Yixuan Sun, Minghang Zheng +4
Jul 13, 2026cs.SD

Qwen-Music Technical Report

We introduce Qwen-Music, a music generation model that produces high-fidelity songs with complete vocals. It supports text-to-music generation from descriptions, lyrics, and musical attributes, and cover song generation with different styles and vocal characteristics. Qwen-Music comprises three components: Qwen-Music-Tokenizer, Qwen-Music-LLM, and Qwen-Music-Render. The tokenizer compresses audio into a 25 Hz single-codebook stream of Music Semantic Tokens that preserve semantic and melodic information. The LLM performs autoregressive modeling with a melody-token-based chain-of-thought (Melody-CoT) mechanism that plans melodies before full-song generation, improving musicality, structural coherence, and reference-melody preservation. The renderer enriches discrete semantic tokens with acoustic details to produce high-fidelity stereo waveforms. We train the LLM using a quality-aware pre-training curriculum followed by progressive post-training with supervised initialization, offline DPO, and online GSPO to improve musicality and instruction following. On 600 evaluation inputs, Qwen-Music achieves state-of-the-art results in 13 of 16 objective musicality and audio-quality metrics. Professional evaluators also prefer Qwen-Music over leading proprietary systems. For cover generation, Qwen-Music preserves reference melodies more accurately than Suno V5.5, Suno V5, and MiniMax Cover on the AI-generated reference set, and outperforms MiniMax Cover on most metrics on the real-world popular-song reference set.
Jin Xu, Kangdi Wang, Ruibin Yuan +24
Jul 13, 2026cs.AI

Verifier-Guided Twelve-Tone Composition: A Generate-Verify-Repair Harness for Symbolic Music Generation

Large language models can produce superficially legal twelve-tone scores that collapse into degenerate textures. We introduce a neuro-symbolic harness that wraps a language-model proposer in a generate-verify-repair-trace loop with symbolic verification. The complete pipeline improves event-local consistency without claiming whole-piece legality. Across 40 controlled tasks and four paired models, constraint-checked delivery rises from 13.3% under raw generation to 48.1% with the harness; it abstains on the remaining 51.9% of runs. The pass rate of a narrower collision and serialisation-consistency check rises from 33.5% to 58.3%, while degeneracy remains near 0.05, including under adversarial prompting. A blinded evaluation by five experts also shows a descriptive aggregate preference for harness candidates over raw generation in adherence, perceived legality, coherence, and overall quality.
Congren Dai, Danni Zhao, Enyang Liu +7
Jul 13, 2026cs.SD

BeatEdit: Symbolic Music Generation as Explicit Editing

Music creation is fundamentally a process of revision. Yet symbolic music generation remains dominated by paradigms that produce complete sequences from scratch, with limited support for selective modification. Edit-based methods have proven effective for text transformation tasks, but remain largely unexplored for symbolic music. We trace this absence to the representational level: conventional event-based music encodings lack the structural properties required by explicit music editing. In contrast, the BEAT encoding, a beat-grid-anchored representation originally designed for autoregressive generation, possesses structural properties amenable to editing. We propose BeatEdit, the first framework for symbolic music generation based on explicit edit operations, recasting generation as producing new content by editing a draft rather than synthesizing from scratch. BeatEdit comprises three complementary mechanisms along an axis of increasing edit density: per-token sequence tagging for error correction, iterative refinement for accompaniment editing, and tag-then-fill for segment completion. All these mechanisms share a single encoding and pre-trained backbone, achieving higher precision and perceptual quality than autoregressive and diffusion methods across all three tasks, while remaining efficient, with single-pass inference completing in under 100 ms. Cross-encoding evaluation further reveals that encoding design substantially influences editing effectiveness, with notable encoding-method interaction effects. Code is available at https://github.com/Haoyu-Gu/BeatEdit-code
Haoyu Gu, Lekai Qian, Haowu Zhou +2
Jul 13, 2026cs.SD

MusicMark: A Robust Generative Watermarking Framework for Music Generation

AI music generation has rapidly advanced alongside commercial platforms, raising the need for reliable watermarking for provenance and attribution. However, existing audio watermarking research has largely focused on speech, and applying speech-oriented methods to music is challenging due to music's complex structure and rich acoustic texture. Most existing methods are post-hoc, adding imperceptible perturbations after generation rather than embedding watermarks as part of the content. This makes them fragile under transformations and especially vulnerable to neural codec re-synthesis, which can discard imperceptible residual signals. Moreover, since generation and watermarking are decoupled, the watermarking step can be bypassed or omitted, weakening provenance guarantees. To address these issues, we propose MusicMark, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first generative watermarking framework for music. Specifically, MusicMark embeds watermark messages into the semantic latent space during generation, incorporating the watermark as part of the musical content and ensuring robustness against diverse attacks, particularly neural codec re-synthesis. To this end, we introduce a watermark adapter into a diffusion-based generation model to embed watermark messages across denoising steps. The adapter and detector are trained with a joint objective that preserves fidelity by constraining watermarked latents close to their unwatermarked reference latents, while improving robustness through attack augmentations. Experiments demonstrate that MusicMark substantially outperforms post-hoc baselines across diverse attacks including neural codec re-synthesis, while maintaining comparable generation quality. We further introduce a cover-song attack, converting the singing voice while preserving musical content, and show that MusicMark remains more robust than post-hoc methods.
Seohwan Yun, Jeeyoung Yun, Yongjin Kim +2
Jul 12, 2026cs.SD

Dance to Music Generation leveraging Pre-training with Unpaired data and Contrastive Alignment

Dance-to-music generation is a promising task for applications such as choreography support and automatic accompaniment, where temporal coordination between body movement and sound is essential. In particular, using human joint positions as the motion representation is attractive because they explicitly capture body dynamics while being lightweight, privacy-preserving, and easy to integrate with motion capture and pose-estimation pipelines. A central challenge in this setting, however, is the scarcity of high-quality paired dance-music data, since collecting accurately synchronized pairs is costly and often constrained by copyright and performance rights. This makes it difficult to train end-to-end models solely from paired data. To address this issue, we propose a dance-conditioned music generation framework that efficiently exploits both unpaired and paired data. Our method combines pretrained unimodal encoders for motion and music, beat-guided contrastive pretraining to align their feature spaces, and a ControlNet-style conditioning module on top of a pretrained text-to-audio diffusion model. Experiments on AIST++ demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve both dance-music alignment and audio quality, as confirmed by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared to a state-of-the-art method, our approach achieves superior dance alignment performance and competitive audio quality. Code is available at https://github.com/kmraven/AudioLDM-ControlNet .
Ryota Kimura, Sangheon Park, Natalia Polouliakh +1
Jul 10, 2026cs.SD

Event-Based Token Sequences for Audio-Conditioned Music-Game Level Modeling

Procedural generation of music game levels is an exciting yet challenging problem, as levels must translate musical structure into interactive sequences of timed gameplay events. Most existing approaches formulate this task by frame-based representations, dividing audio into uniform time grids and predicting events at each frame. This makes gameplay events implicit across many frames. As a result, it is hard to describe event-level timing relations and longer-range structure found in human-authored levels. We use procedural generation as a practical setting to study how musical cues map to interactive event sequences. Inspired by event-based symbolic music modeling, we propose a token-level sequence formulation that casts level generation as a multimodal sequence-to-sequence problem. Conditioned on an audio excerpt and level metadata, the model generates a token sequence alternating gameplay-event and beat-shift tokens. This explicitly represents actions and their relative timing in beat space. Based on this formulation, we build a Transformer model. It outperforms representative frame-level baselines under event-level evaluation. It also enables systematic analysis of how audio supports rhythm-aligned event prediction beyond metadata conditioning.
Ke Zhang, Chu-Hsuan Hsueh, Kokolo Ikeda
Jul 8, 2026cs.SD

MADB: A Large-Scale Music Aesthetics Dataset with Professional and Multi-Dimensional Annotations

Music aesthetic assessment is a challenging yet underexplored problem, requiring models to capture fine-grained, multi-dimensional human perceptual judgments. Progress in this area has been limited by the lack of large-scale datasets with structured aesthetic annotations. We introduce MADB, a large-scale dataset and benchmark comprising 9,999 tracks annotated by 30 trained annotators. Each track is rated by around 10 annotators across 10 perceptual dimensions and one overall score, with additional textual comments for multimodal analysis. We establish a unified evaluation framework over multiple pretrained models. Results reveal substantial gaps between model predictions and human judgments, exposing key limitations of current approaches. MADB provides a new benchmark for human-aligned music understanding. Project page: https://github.com/knownree/madb
Sirui Zhang, Tianle Wang, Xinyi Tong +8
Jul 7, 2026cs.SD

Designing Maintainable Hybrid Generative Systems: A Quantum-Inspired Approach to Automated Music Harmony Generation

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a maintainable hybrid generative architecture for automated music harmony generation from melody. The proposed system combines quantum-inspired candidate exploration over overlapping melodic contexts with explicit rule-based optimization to balance generative flexibility and structural control. The architecture is evaluated using explicit and reproducible metrics covering structural coherence, functional agreement, harmonic similarity, and robustness. The results show that the proposed approach produces harmonizations that preserve tonal structure and cadential behavior while allowing multiple valid harmonic realizations. Furthermore, the optimization layer improves structural coherence, stability, and predictability without requiring a training corpus. The study demonstrates that transparent and controllable hybrid generative systems can be systematically designed and evaluated within the context of Information Systems Development.
Josef Pavlicek
Jul 7, 2026cs.SD

From Textural Counterpoint to Feature Encoding: A Multi-Dimensional Machine Representation Study of Haydn's "The Lark" Integrating Electroacoustic Analysis

Chamber music, as a highly precise multi-part interactive system, contains a logic of "role assignment and dynamic interaction" that provides an extremely valuable blueprint for exploring human-computer collaborative composition paradigms. Addressing the lack of role perception capabilities in existing deep music generation models during polyphonic interactions, this paper conducts an interdisciplinary analysis of Haydn's String Quartet in D Major, The Lark (Op. 64, No. 5). We propose a novel research path: "Classical Morphology Qualitative Analysis-Electroacoustic Quantitative Measurement-Machine Representation Reconstruction." The study first utilizes auditory analysis to dissect the counterpoint morphology of the leading voice and the underlying groove in the first movement. Subsequently, it introduces spectrum and dynamic feature analysis tools from a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to translate subjective auditory perception into objective, measurable physical parameters. Building on this, the paper introduces a fundamentally new approach to low-level computer feature extraction: completely abandoning the traditional mechanical quantization grid, introducing Event-based Timestamps to record the duration of micro-timing, and transforming acoustic features into an independent "Role-Aware Encoding" as an aesthetic heuristic mechanism (a phenomenological anchor). This study not only completes the logical loop spanning classical analysis, electronic music mapping, and AI symbolic generation but also establishes a profound theoretical foundation-from the perspectives of interactive aesthetics and media philosophy-for constructing human-computer collaborative music systems imbued with "social attributes" and "otherness awareness."
Yakun Liu, Zhiyu Jin, Hai Luan +2
Jul 6, 2026cs.AI

Quantum-Inspired Harmonic Decision Models: A Computational Framework for Music Generation

This paper introduces a quantum-inspired computational framework for harmonic decision-making in music. The proposed approach formulates harmonization as an optimization problem within a structured combinatorial space, where multiple candidate chord sequences are evaluated under interacting musical constraints. The model combines an interference-based harmonization stage with a classical optimization procedure grounded in tonal harmony. The quantum-inspired component enables the parallel consideration of multiple harmonic alternatives, while the classical stage refines the resulting sequences to ensure structural coherence and stylistic plausibility. The framework is evaluated on selected musical examples, including Autumn Leaves and It's a Long Way to Tipperary. Quantitative analysis shows that the optimization stage significantly reduces chord density, increases harmonic stability, and improves functional organization. At the same time, expert evaluation highlights the importance of stylistic context, demonstrating that increased harmonic complexity is not always perceived as more natural. The results suggest that harmonic generation can be interpreted as a structured decision-making process in a constrained search space. The proposed approach provides a computational model that integrates domain-specific knowledge with an interference-based search mechanism. Although preliminary, this work indicates that quantum-inspired methods may offer a useful framework for modeling complex decision processes in creative domains such as music. The proposed framework contributes to ongoing research on quantum-inspired models of cognition and decision-making in complex biological and creative systems.
Josef Pavlíček, Petra Pavlíčková, Martin Molhanec
Jul 6, 2026cs.SD

Extending Xenakis: From Architectural Geometry to Sonification of the Philips Pavilion

Architecture and music have been linked through proportion and temporal structure, yet architectural geometry is rarely viewed as a source of generative music. Revisiting Xenakis' one-directional transformation from string glissandi in Metastaseis to the ruled surfaces of the Philips Pavilion, we invert this workflow and sonify the completed Pavilion as a temporal composition. We reconstruct the Pavilion as nine ruled surfaces, extract their governing ruling lines, and subdivide each surface into structural lines and spatial sampling points. Four evenly spaced ruling lines per surface generate continuous string glissandi, while 3357 sampled points develop five density-based energy blocks and a sparse brass and woodwind subsequence. Implemented in Python, the system produces MIDI rendered in Ableton Live, accompanied by a real-time 3D visualization that reveals architectural motion, stasis, and structural contrast through sound and image. In general, this work paves the way for the transfer of architectural geometry as a performable musical structure, extending Xenakis's architectural and musical thinking to sonification and interactive music practice.
Changda Ma, Sunshiyu Wang, Canting Zhu +1
Jul 2, 2026cs.SD

UT-AISTimprt submission for ICME 2026 Grand Challenge on Academic Text-to-Music Generation

This work investigates the effect of batch sampling strategies during training for text-to-audio music generation under low-data and small-scale model settings. This paper describes our approach and findings for the ICME 2026 Grand Challenge on Academic Text-to-Music Generation. Training data are clustered using either text embeddings or audio embeddings, and samples with similar characteristics are grouped within the same mini-batch to mitigate gradient interference. The effects of modality and cluster granularity on clustering are analyzed. Results show that clustering based on text embeddings achieves better performance on objective evaluation metrics than clustering based on audio embeddings. In addition, different cluster granularity leads to different behaviors across evaluation criteria: a moderate number of clusters performs best on objective metrics, while a larger number of clusters tends to exhibit music with more coherent structure in listening tests.
Shunsuke Yoshida, Yu-Hua Chen, Satoru Fukayama
Jul 1, 2026cs.CY

What's a Credit Worth? A Market Framework for Attribution-Aware Compensation in Generative Music

Advances in generative AI are rapidly increasing the quality and commercial value of generated music, and this progress depends on large catalogs of creators' recordings. This raises a central question for platform design: how should creators be compensated when their work is used to train generative AI models that in turn produce commercial outputs? We develop a framework for fairly compensating creators in generative-music markets, where each creator's payment depends on a data-attribution score estimating their contribution to model outputs. Compared to past compensation frameworks, our framework has two unique considerations: (1) attribution is traced to entire creator catalogs, not individual songs, and (2) the informativeness (signal-to-noise ratio) of the attribution score is an input to the payment mechanism. The framework yields a closed-form payment rule per creator and measures the welfare cost of inaccurate attribution for both creators and the platform. Whether the welfare-optimal contract is royalty-based or takes the form of fixed-fee licensing depends on how informative attribution is for that creator's catalog. We show that better attribution translates directly into welfare gains for both creators and the platform, yet under multi-platform competition a platform only captures gains from attribution improvements when its signal becomes the most precise in the market. To ground our framework in empirical behavior, we train acoustic and symbolic music generation models and measure the informativeness of scalable attribution techniques against a leave-one-catalog-out ground truth. Our experiments reveal that noisy attribution signals push payment toward fixed-fee licensing and diminish welfare for both creators and the platform, providing an economic motivation for further research on improved attribution.
Luyang Zhang, Xirui Jiang, Junwei Deng +3
Jul 1, 2026cs.SD

A Text-Steerable Instrument for Sketching Procedural Soundscapes via Language Models

We present a real-time musical interface that converts natural-language scene descriptions into evolving procedural soundscapes. A performer types a prompt such as "warm jazz cafe at midnight" and steers it through direct parameter adjustments - stepping brightness down, switching a rhythm style - each producing a predictable, audible shift without re-prompting. Where GPU-bound text-to-audio systems synthesize monolithic waveforms, our instrument generates human-readable configurations over a categorical schema, enabling fine-grained performer control; most valid combinations are designed to sound musically coherent. Three interchangeable backends - embedding retrieval for sub-second CPU-only use, hosted LLMs via API, and a fine-tuned 270M local model - all emit the same schema. A live generator architecture continuously emits audio while resolving new instructions in the background, crossfading seamlessly when ready; even when an LLM takes 5-12 seconds to respond, the audience hears uninterrupted sound - reframing text-to-music as an ongoing performable stream rather than a one-shot generation. We evaluate text-audio semantic alignment using LAION-CLAP on held-out prompts as a technical proxy, finding that retrieval-based configuration outperforms random valid configurations on this metric, while noting that LAION-CLAP also informed retrieval-map construction. We report performance observations, informal listener feedback, and release materials for the SDK, dataset artifacts, model, and audiovisual performance interface.
Prabal Gupta
Jun 29, 2026cs.SD

LeVo 2: Stable and Melodious Song Generation via Hierarchical Representation Modeling and Progressive Post-Training

Full-length song generation must preserve coherence and musicality, render detailed vocal and accompaniment acoustics, and follow lyrics and prompts. Existing language model-based systems face a structural trade-off: mixed-token modeling preserves vocal-instrument coordination but obscures track-specific details, whereas dual-track prediction improves acoustics but requires longer sequences and weakens global planning. We present LeVo 2, a hybrid LLM-Diffusion framework for controllable full-length song generation. LeVo 2 formulates this trade-off as hierarchical modeling: LeLM first predicts mixed tokens for semantic planning, then predicts vocal and accompaniment tokens in parallel for track-specific refinement, while a diffusion-based Music Codec reconstructs full-length waveforms. A central contribution of this extended version is an aesthetics-guided training schedule for alignment. During pre-training, an automated music aesthetic evaluation framework assigns musicality-tier conditions to large-scale data, providing musicality priors before preference alignment. Progressive post-training applies SFT, large-scale offline DPO, and closed-loop semi-online DPO to separately improve generation quality, controllability, and musicality. Modular extension then trains the Track-Specific LM for acoustic refinement while preserving the aligned semantic planner. This schedule separates musicality learning, controllability alignment, and acoustic refinement, mitigating optimization conflict and the limitations of static offline preference pairs. Expert listening tests and objective evaluations show that LeVo 2 outperforms open-source baselines across six subjective dimensions, and approaches leading commercial systems on several listening metrics. Ablations validate the effects of the training strategy, aesthetics guidance, scaling, and hierarchical architecture.
Shun Lei, Huaicheng Zhang, Dapeng Wu +8
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

OmniDance: Multimodal Driven Dance Video Generation with Large-scale Internet Data

Music-driven dance video generation aims to synthesize expressive human motion that is temporally aligned with music while maintaining high visual fidelity. Despite recent progress, existing methods still face two key limitations: the lack of large-scale, high-quality dance video datasets, and the absence of principled frameworks for integrating music as a complementary conditioning signal into Video Generation Foundation Models. To address these limitations, we introduce CIPE-Dance, a large-scale Internet-sourced dance video dataset with choreography-informed text annotations, constructed via a progressive expert pipeline. To the best of our knowledge, CIPE-Dance is the largest dataset for dance video generation to date, comprising 300k high-quality clips over 400 hours and covering diverse dancers, environments, and dance genres. We further propose OmniDance, a framework-level recipe for integrating music into a TI2V foundation model without sacrificing its original controllability or visual fidelity. Motivated by the complementary roles of text as low-frequency semantics and music as high-frequency temporal dynamics, OmniDance co-designs a depth-aware specialization architecture, an anchored easy-to-hard curriculum learning strategy, and a modality-specialized time-dependent CFG strategy, enabling unified TI2V, MI2V, and MTI2V generation. Extensive experiments on CIPE-Dance demonstrate that OmniDance achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three tasks and exhibits robust multimodal integration capability. Project is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/OmniDance.
Kaixing Yang, Jiashu Zhu, Xulong Tang +8
Jun 23, 2026cs.SD

Real-Time Interactive Music Generation via Data-Free Streaming Consistency Distillation

Interactive music and live performance relies on real-time human expression, but modern generative music AI remains largely absent from this domain due to its prohibitive inference latency and offline rendering paradigm. To provide pioneer musicians with a novel medium for interactive composition, we should fundamentally change these static models into dynamic, playable instruments. In this paper, we propose a framework that bridges this gap. To achieve the low latency required for live interaction without sacrificing structural coherence, we formulate distillation within a streaming autoregressive latent space. Our approach gets rid of the need for expensive paired audio-latent datasets by utilizing prompt-only inputs to synthesize teacher-guided, chunk-wise trajectories on the fly. Because live instruments require high acoustic fidelity, we introduce music-aware consistency objectives, which combine latent, spectral, and temporal-difference losses, to preserve crucial qualities like timbre, transients, and rhythmic stability during accelerated single-step streaming generation. Implemented via parameter-efficient adaptation, our distillation reduces generation steps to achieve a low real-time factor. Crucially, by operating as a continuous autoregressive stream, the system can seamlessly assimilate dynamic human inputs on the fly, allowing users to instantly steer the musical trajectory without interrupting the audio flow. Ultimately, this work recontextualizes generative text-to-music models not as passive prompt-and-wait systems, but as responsive instruments, opening new frontiers for live human-AI musical co-creation.
Baisen Wang, Chenxi Bao, Qisong Han
Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

Text Dictates, Music Decorates: Energy-based Attention for Editable Dance Motion Generation

Choreographic motion generation poses unique challenges for AI, demanding precise semantic control over complex, temporally structured, and expressive full-body dynamics. While existing models can synthesize motion from music, they remain largely black boxes. Conversely, attempting to condition generation on both text and music frequently leads to modality collapse, where dense acoustic rhythms overwhelm sparse semantic text prompts, destroying user controllability. To resolve this spatial-temporal conflict, we propose STREAM (Structural-Temporal Rhythmic Energy-based Attention for Motion), a modality-decoupled diffusion transformer. STREAM strictly separates conditioning pathways: global text semantics dictate the kinematic structure via Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN), while a novel Bimodal Energy-Based Attention Module (BEAM) routes these features to the musical beat without overwriting the semantics. We further introduce Motorica++, a newly curated dataset enriched with domain-specific dance vocabulary and frame-level semantic annotations from existing Motorica dataset. Additionally, to rigorously quantify zero-shot editability, we propose the Exchange Evaluation Protocol and Editable Dance Score (EDS). Through extensive experiments, STREAM achieves state-of-the-art alignment between motion and music while perfectly preserving choreographic semantics, positioning AI not merely as a reactive synthesizer, but as a controllable, collaborative partner for artistic direction. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/SeongJong-Yoo/STREAM.
Seong Jong Yoo, Siyuan Peng, Felix Gu +2
Jun 21, 2026cs.SD

Libretto: Giving LLM Agents a Sense of Musical Structure

Generative music systems can now produce impressive audio from text prompts, but audio outputs are difficult to inspect, edit, and diagnose as musical structure. We introduce Libretto, an agent-facing framework for symbolic music generation and revision. Libretto uses an LLM-native grammar with explicit onset slots, voices, and bar-level organization, then evaluates each piece in a corpus-calibrated statistical space over rhythm, harmony, melody, texture, form, and variation. The same structural axes support retrieval, diagnosis, copy-risk control, and iterative self-revision. Across gap filling, reference-guided full-piece generation, gradual morphing, and educational music generation, Libretto turns symbolic music from a raw token sequence into a measurable and editable object for language-model agents.
Yichen Xu
Jun 19, 2026cs.SD

Improving Text-to-Music Generation with Human Preference Rewards

We describe our entry to the efficiency track of the Academic Text-to-Music (ATTM) Grand Challenge at ICME 2026. Beyond the challenge protocol's FAD-CLAP and CLAP score, we add a learned human-preference reward from TuneJury, a twin pairwise ranker trained over open music-preference datasets. The reward serves both as a training-time conditioning signal and as a sample-selection criterion. The pipeline combines five engineering decisions on a 120M-parameter FluxAudio-S backbone, four at training time and one at inference: (i) training-time reward conditioning that doubles as an inference-time CFG axis, (ii) a sweep over five score-conditioning architectures, where training and inference use different variants, (iii) expert iteration on the top decile, (iv) a short preference-tuning pass (CRPO) for audio-text alignment, and (v) inference post-processing via joint CFG, source separation, and loudness normalization. Per-stage decomposition on 100 Song Describer prompts shows training-time reward conditioning as a functional conditioning axis, expert iteration as the dominant contributor, the preference-tuning pass adding only noise-level gain, and the inference-time score scalar already saturated by the end of the chain.
Yonghyun Kim, Junwon Lee, Haiwen Xia +2
Jun 19, 2026cs.SD

LK Jam: System Architecture and Implementation of a Real-Time Human-AI Interactive Music Generation System using Role-Aware GRU

As artificial intelligence advances into the era of Embodied AI, live musical interaction urgently needs to break free from the limitations of offline, unidirectional generation, achieving a "virtual synergy" capable of low-latency, dynamic interplay. To address this, this technical report presents LK_Jam, a real-time, bidirectional human-computer interactive music generation system based on a lightweight Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and a high-performance audio host architecture. In the algorithmic representation layer, this system abandons the computationally expensive fixed time-grid. Instead, it constructs a multi-dimensional sparse event stream integrating time-shifts, continuous harmonic embeddings, and role-aware encoding, enabling the model to accurately capture turn-taking logic and micro-timing in a single-step inference. In the engineering implementation layer, this paper builds a strict multithreaded lock-free communication bridge using C++ and the JUCE framework, incorporating the RTNeural inference engine designed specifically for real-time audio. By utilizing compile-time network topology solidification and a zero-allocation (allocation-free) mechanism, the end-to-end overhead of autoregressive decoding is strictly locked at O(1)O(1) complexity, structurally mitigating the risk of audio thread dropouts in DAW plugin environments. Furthermore, this study designs a three-stage progressive training strategy, achieving a leap from basic chord harmonization to expert-level interaction. Preliminary observations and architectural analysis demonstrate that while ensuring musical coherence and interactive role-play, the proposed system successfully challenges extreme real-time engineering constraints, offering a highly robust and deployable technical paradigm for next-generation AI co-performers in live music.
Yakun Liu, Zhiyu Jin, Dong Liu +1
Jun 17, 2026cs.SD

Closing the Loop: PID Feedback Control for Interpretable Activation Steering in Symbolic Music Generation

Transformer-based architectures have significantly advanced the generation of complex symbolic sequences, yet a significant gap remains in achieving fine-grained, interpretable control over discrete signal attributes. This paper investigates the mechanistic interpretability of the Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) and proposes a framework for deterministic attribute modulation without retraining to bridge this gap via inference-time activation steering. Utilizing the Difference-in-Means (DiffMean) methodology, we isolate latent directions for signal attributes, specifically Pitch and Duration, within the residual stream. We validate the Linear Representation Hypothesis in this domain, achieving high correlation between steering magnitude and attribute shift. To address the inherent feature entanglement in multi-attribute steering, we introduce a Dual Steering framework utilizing Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this geometric decoupling reduces conceptual interference and signal degradation compared to naive vector addition, enabling independent deterministic control even against strong autoregressive conditioning.
Ioannis Prokopiou, Pantelis Vikatos, Maximos Kaliakatsos-Papakostas +2
Jun 15, 2026cs.SD

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.
Yonghyun Kim, Junwon Lee, Haiwen Xia +5
Jun 15, 2026cs.SD

Beyond Artifacts: Towards Generalizable Synthetic Song Detection via Music-Intrinsic Features

The rapid advancement of AI music generators highlights the urgent need for reliable Synthetic Song Detection (SSD). Existing SSD methods often rely on low-level artifacts or fixed feature assumptions, struggling to capture generator-agnostic cues. To address this, we propose Sofia (Synthetic-song detection framework via music features), a flexible framework that models music-intrinsic attributes via feature-specific experts and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. By configuring Sofia with representative Vocal, Audio-effect, Global structure features, and their combinations, we present their individual and complementary contributions. To comprehensively evaluate our framework, we further construct MUSIC8K, a challenging benchmark featuring lastest emerging generators and realistic audio perturbations. Experiments show that Sofia learns generator-agnostic representations from music-intrinsic features, improving the F1 score by 18.5 points over the strongest baseline on MUSIC8K-O while maintaining strong robustness.
Yan Han, Zhibin Wen, Yuan Wang +4
Jun 14, 2026eess.AS

Noise-Driven Instrument Based on Coherent Quantum and Stochastic Oscillator Models

In recent years, emerging research at the intersection of quantum physics and sound synthesis has opened new conceptual and technical possibilities for instrument design and sonic exploration. This study investigates the potential of formal analogies between quantum systems and classically non-deterministic systems for the generation of tangible acoustic phenomena. Specifically, it explores how quantum mechanical concepts can serve not only as metaphors but as operative frameworks in the design of new musical tools. Building on recent theoretical work on stochastic string excitation, we present the design, fabrication, and spectral characterization of a custom-built noise-driven electroacoustic string instrument. The system implements open-loop stochastic electromagnetic actuation without feedback or pitch stabilization. We show that this excitation strategy produces a dense and uniformly distributed spectral regime that differs from conventional deterministic string excitation. This work contributes to a growing field of quantum music creation by offering a hybrid artistic-scientific platform with potential applications in live performance, experimental composition, and science education.
Felipe Gonzalez de la Maza, Maciej Lewenstein, Antoine Reserbat-Plantey +1
Jun 8, 2026eess.AS

DeRA-MOS: Optimizing Text-to-Music Evaluation via Decoupled Listwise Ranking and Modality Alignment

Evaluating text-to-music (TTM) systems remains expensive because music impression (MI) and text alignment (TA) scores rely on human mean opinion scores (MOS). Most automatic MOS estimators are trained with point-wise regression or distributional classification. These objectives do not directly optimize rank-based metrics and provide weak geometric constraints for cross-modal coherence. To address these gaps, we propose DeRA-MOS, a decoupled optimization framework for TTM evaluation. For MI, we introduce a batch-aware listwise ranking loss that models relative order within each mini-batch and better aligns with evaluation based on Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC). For TA, we introduce a score-anchored modality alignment loss that maps human scores to target audio-text similarity and regularizes the latent space before fusion. By effectively mitigating the point-wise training mismatch and modality drift, experiments on MusicEval demonstrate that our decoupled framework yields substantial improvements in both MI and TA ranking metrics, establishing a robust paradigm for large-scale TTM evaluation.
Chien-Chun Wang, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang +1