Back to Ear: Perceptually Driven High Fidelity Music Reconstruction

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are essential for large-scale audio tasks like diffusion-based generation. However, existing open-source models often neglect auditory perceptual aspects during training, leading to weaknesses in phase accuracy and stereophonic spatial representation. To address these challenges, we propose {\epsilon}ar-VAE, an open-source music signal reconstruction model that rethinks and optimizes the VAE training paradigm. Our contributions are threefold: (i) A K-weighting perceptual filter applied prior to loss calculation to align the objective with auditory perception. (ii) Two novel phase losses: a Correlation Loss for stereo coherence, and a Phase Loss using its derivatives--Instantaneous Frequency and Group Delay--for precision. (iii) A new spectral supervision paradigm where magnitude is supervised by all four Mid/Side/Left/Right components, while phase is supervised only by the LR components. Experiments show {\epsilon}ar-VAE at 44.1kHz substantially outperforms leading open-source models across diverse metrics, showing particular strength in reconstructing high-frequency harmonics and the spatial characteristics.

A Long-Tail Friendly Representation Framework for Artist and Music Similarity

The investigation of the similarity between artists and music is crucial in music retrieval and recommendation, and addressing the challenge of the long-tail phenomenon is increasingly important. This paper proposes a Long-Tail Friendly Representation Framework (LTFRF) that utilizes neural networks to model the similarity relationship. Our approach integrates music, user, metadata, and relationship data into a unified metric learning framework, and employs a meta-consistency relationship as a regular term to introduce the Multi-Relationship Loss. Compared to the Graph Neural Network (GNN), our proposed framework improves the representation performance in long-tail scenarios, which are characterized by sparse relationships between artists and music. We conduct experiments and analysis on the AllMusic dataset, and the results demonstrate that our framework provides a favorable generalization of artist and music representation. Specifically, on similar artist/music recommendation tasks, the LTFRF outperforms the baseline by 9.69%/19.42% in Hit Ratio@10, and in long-tail cases, the framework achieves 11.05%/14.14% higher than the baseline in Consistent@10.

InstructME: An Instruction Guided Music Edit And Remix Framework with Latent Diffusion Models

Music editing primarily entails the modification of instrument tracks or remixing in the whole, which offers a novel reinterpretation of the original piece through a series of operations. These music processing methods hold immense potential across various applications but demand substantial expertise. Prior methodologies, although effective for image and audio modifications, falter when directly applied to music. This is attributed to music's distinctive data nature, where such methods can inadvertently compromise the intrinsic harmony and coherence of music. In this paper, we develop InstructME, an Instruction guided Music Editing and remixing framework based on latent diffusion models. Our framework fortifies the U-Net with multi-scale aggregation in order to maintain consistency before and after editing. In addition, we introduce chord progression matrix as condition information and incorporate it in the semantic space to improve melodic harmony while editing. For accommodating extended musical pieces, InstructME employs a chunk transformer, enabling it to discern long-term temporal dependencies within music sequences. We tested InstructME in instrument-editing, remixing, and multi-round editing. Both subjective and objective evaluations indicate that our proposed method significantly surpasses preceding systems in music quality, text relevance and harmony. Demo samples are available at https://musicedit.github.io/