voice2mode: Phonation Mode Classification in Singing using Self-Supervised Speech Models

We present voice2mode, a method for classification of four singing phonation modes (breathy, neutral (modal), flow, and pressed) using embeddings extracted from large self-supervised speech models. Prior work on singing phonation has relied on handcrafted signal features or task-specific neural nets; this work evaluates the transferability of speech foundation models to singing phonation classification. voice2mode extracts layer-wise representations from HuBERT and two wav2vec2 variants, applies global temporal pooling, and classifies the pooled embeddings with lightweight classifiers (SVM, XGBoost). Experiments on a publicly available soprano dataset (763 sustained vowel recordings, four labels) show that foundation-model features substantially outperform conventional spectral baselines (spectrogram, mel-spectrogram, MFCC). HuBERT embeddings obtained from early layers yield the best result (~95.7% accuracy with SVM), an absolute improvement of ~12-15% over the best traditional baseline. We also show layer-wise behaviour: lower layers, which retain acoustic/phonetic detail, are more effective than top layers specialized for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).

Music Generation using Human-In-The-Loop Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents an approach that combines Human-In-The-Loop Reinforcement Learning (HITL RL) with principles derived from music theory to facilitate real-time generation of musical compositions. HITL RL, previously employed in diverse applications such as modelling humanoid robot mechanics and enhancing language models, harnesses human feedback to refine the training process. In this study, we develop a HILT RL framework that can leverage the constraints and principles in music theory. In particular, we propose an episodic tabular Q-learning algorithm with an epsilon-greedy exploration policy. The system generates musical tracks (compositions), continuously enhancing its quality through iterative human-in-the-loop feedback. The reward function for this process is the subjective musical taste of the user.