VocalParse: Towards Unified and Scalable Singing Voice Transcription with Large Audio Language Models

High-quality singing annotations are fundamental to modern Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) systems. However, obtaining these annotations at scale through manual labeling is unrealistic due to the substantial labor and musical expertise required, making automatic annotation highly necessary. Despite their utility, current automatic transcription systems face significant challenges: they often rely on complex multi-stage pipelines, struggle to recover text-note alignments, and exhibit poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) singing data. To alleviate these issues, we present VocalParse, a unified singing voice transcription (SVT) model built upon a Large Audio Language Model (LALM). Specifically, our novel contribution is to introduce an interleaved prompting formulation that jointly models lyrics, melody, and word-note correspondence, yielding a generated sequence that directly maps to a structured musical score. Furthermore, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) style prompting strategy, which decodes lyrics first as a semantic scaffold, significantly mitigating the context disruption problem while preserving the structural benefits of interleaved generation. Experiments demonstrate that VocalParse achieves state-of-the-art SVT performance on multiple singing datasets. The source code and checkpoint are available at https://github.com/pymaster17/VocalParse.

Video-Robin: Autoregressive Diffusion Planning for Intent-Grounded Video-to-Music Generation

Video-to-music (V2M) is the fundamental task of creating background music for an input video. Recent V2M models achieve audiovisual alignment by typically relying on visual conditioning alone and provide limited semantic and stylistic controllability to the end user. In this paper, we present Video-Robin, a novel text-conditioned video-to-music generation model that enables fast, high-quality, semantically aligned music generation for video content. To balance musical fidelity and semantic understanding, Video-Robin integrates autoregressive planning with diffusion-based synthesis. Specifically, an autoregressive module models global structure by semantically aligning visual and textual inputs to produce high-level music latents. These latents are subsequently refined into coherent, high-fidelity music using local Diffusion Transformers. By factoring semantically driven planning into diffusion-based synthesis, Video-Robin enables fine-grained creator control without sacrificing audio realism. Our proposed model outperforms baselines that solely accept video input and additional feature conditioned baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks with a 2.21x speed in inference compared to SOTA. We will open-source everything upon paper acceptance.

Latent Fourier Transform

We introduce the Latent Fourier Transform (LatentFT), a framework that provides novel frequency-domain controls for generative music models. LatentFT combines a diffusion autoencoder with a latent-space Fourier transform to separate musical patterns by timescale. By masking latents in the frequency domain during training, our method yields representations that can be manipulated coherently at inference. This allows us to generate musical variations and blends from reference examples while preserving characteristics at desired timescales, which are specified as frequencies in the latent space. LatentFT parallels the role of the equalizer in music production: while traditional equalizers operates on audible frequencies to shape timbre, LatentFT operates on latent-space frequencies to shape musical structure. Experiments and listening tests show that LatentFT improves condition adherence and quality compared to baselines. We also present a technique for hearing frequencies in the latent space in isolation, and show different musical attributes reside in different regions of the latent spectrum. Our results show how frequency-domain control in latent space provides an intuitive, continuous frequency axis for conditioning and blending, advancing us toward more interpretable and interactive generative music models.

Transcoda: End-to-End Zero-Shot Optical Music Recognition via Data-Centric Synthetic Training

Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the task of transcribing sheet music into a structured textual representation, is currently bottlenecked by a lack of large-scale, annotated datasets of real scans. This forces models to rely on either few-shot transfer or synthetic training pipelines that remain overly simplistic. A secondary challenge is encoding non-uniqueness: in the popular Humdrum **kern format for transcribing music, multiple different text encodings can render into the same visual sheet music. This one-to-many mapping creates a harder learning task and introduces high uncertainty during decoding. We propose Transcoda, an OMR system built on (i) an advanced synthetic data generation pipeline, (ii) a normalization of the **kern encoding to enforce a unique normal form and (iii) grammar-based decoding to ensure the syntactic correctness of the output. This approach allows us to train a compact 59M-parameter model in just 6 hours on a single GPU that outperforms billion-parameter baselines. Transcoda achieves the best score among state of the art baselines on a newly curated benchmark of synthetically rendered scores at 18.46% OMR-NED (compared to 43.91% for the next-best system, Legato) and reduces the error rate on historical Polish scans to 63.97% OMR-NED (down from 80.16% for SMT++).

Empirical Study of Pop and Jazz Mix Ratios for Genre-Adaptive Chord Generation

Chord progression generation is practically important but understudied. Most large-scale symbolic music systems target melody, multi-track arrangement, or audio synthesis, and chord-only models tend to be relegated to conditioning components inside larger pipelines. This paper treats chord generation as a standalone task and addresses a question that arises whenever such a model is adapted across genres: how much old-domain data must be retained during fine-tuning to acquire a new domain without forgetting the old? I study jazz fine-tuning starting from a pop-pretrained 25M-parameter Music Transformer (84.24% top-1 chord accuracy on a held-out pop test set). The available jazz corpus is an order of magnitude smaller than the pop corpus, so every fine-tune run uses all 1,513 jazz training sequences. The swept variable is the volume of pop "rehearsal" data mixed alongside, taking values in {0, 1K, 2.5K, 5K, 10K}. Every fine-tuned model gains 7 to 9 points of jazz top-1. Pop accuracy collapses by 2.14 points under jazz-only fine-tuning, recovers to baseline at approximately 2.5K rehearsal samples (1.65x the jazz volume), and saturates beyond that point. A complementary observation: the metric-best run (F3, 2.5K mix) is not always the perceptually preferred one. The pop-leaning (10K) and jazz-leaning (1K) endpoints carry more committed stylistic identities that the author more often selects as finished output in informal listening. I discuss what this suggests for music co-creation tools but make no perceptual claim, since no formal listening study has been conducted. All six checkpoints are released on the HuggingFace Hub at https://huggingface.co/PearlLeeStudio.

BEAT: Tokenizing and Generating Symbolic Music by Uniform Temporal Steps

Tokenizing music to fit the general framework of language models is a compelling challenge, especially considering the diverse symbolic structures in which music can be represented (e.g., sequences, grids, and graphs). To date, most approaches tokenize symbolic music as sequences of musical events, such as onsets, pitches, time shifts, or compound note events. This strategy is intuitive and has proven effective in Transformer-based models, but it treats the regularity of musical time implicitly: individual tokens may span different durations, resulting in non-uniform time progression. In this paper, we instead consider whether an alternative tokenization is possible, where a uniform-length musical step (e.g., a beat) serves as the basic unit. Specifically, we encode all events within a single time step at the same pitch as one token, and group tokens explicitly by time step, which resembles a sparse encoding of a piano-roll representation. We evaluate the proposed tokenization on music continuation and accompaniment generation tasks, comparing it with mainstream event-based methods. Results show improved musical quality and structural coherence, while additional analyses confirm higher efficiency and more effective capture of long-range patterns with the proposed tokenization.

Aligning Language Models for Lyric-to-Melody Generation with Rule-Based Musical Constraints

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in lyric-to-melody generation, but models trained with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) often produce musically implausible melodies with issues like poor rhythm and unsuitable vocal ranges, a phenomenon we term "constraint violation". To address this, we propose a novel alignment framework that instills musical knowledge without human annotation. We define rule-based musical constraints to automatically generate a preference dataset from an SFT model's outputs. The model is then aligned through a sequential process, first using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on paired preference data, followed by Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) on unpaired negative samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our aligned model substantially reduces rule violations and outperforms strong baselines in both objective and subjective evaluations, generating melodies with substantially improved musicality and coherence. An interactive demo with audio comparisons is available at https://arain233.github.io/AligningMelody-demo.

UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions

Generative audio modeling has largely been fragmented into specialized tasks, text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-music (TTM), and text-to-audio (TTA), each operating under heterogeneous control paradigms. Unifying these modalities remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic dissonance between structured semantic representations (speech/music) and unstructured acoustic textures (sound effects). In this paper, we introduce UniSonate, a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, and sound effects through a standardized, reference-free natural language instruction interface. To reconcile structural disparities, we propose a novel dynamic token injection mechanism that projects unstructured environmental sounds into a structured temporal latent space, enabling precise duration control within a phoneme-driven Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT). Coupled with a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy, this approach effectively mitigates cross-modal optimization conflicts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSonate achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS (WER 1.47%) and TTM (SongEval Coherence 3.18), while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. Crucially, we observe positive transfer, where joint training on diverse audio data significantly enhances structural coherence and prosodic expressiveness compared to single-task baselines. Audio samples are available at https://qiangchunyu.github.io/UniSonate/.

Library learning with e-graphs on jazz harmony

Humans can acquire a highly structured intuitive understanding of musical patterns, yet these patterns often require multiple iterations of reflection and re-listening to internalize fully. To capture such an internalization process, we present a computational model for the learning of jazz harmonic patterns based on library learning. Given a corpus of harmonic progressions, our model searches over a space of programs composed of primitive harmonic relations in order to discover concise generative explanations of the corpus. The model first enumerates possible programs for each piece, and then jointly learns a library of harmonic patterns and refactored programs. To efficiently navigate the vast joint space of programs and libraries, we integrate deductive parsing with library learning on e-graphs. We explore how well our model captures aspects of human musical pattern learning by evaluating the intuitiveness of both programs and libraries, as well as similarities to human-written harmonic derivations.

A Cold Diffusion Approach for Percussive Dereverberation

Most recent advances in audio dereverberation focus almost exclusively on speech, leaving percussive and drum signals largely unexplored despite their importance in music production. Percussive dereverberation poses distinct challenges due to sharp transients and dense temporal structure. In this work, we propose a cold diffusion framework for dereverberating stereo drum stems (downmixes), modeling reverberation as a deterministic degradation process that progressively transforms anechoic signals into reverberant ones. We investigate two reverse-process parameterizations, Direct (next-state) and a Delta-normalized residual (velocity-style) prediction, and implement the framework using both a UNet and a diffusion Transformer backbone. The models are trained and evaluated on curated datasets comprising both acoustic and electronic drum recordings, with reverberation generated using a combination of synthetic and real room impulse responses. Extensive experiments on in-domain and fully out-of-domain test sets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms strong score-based and conditional diffusion baselines, evaluated using signal-based and perceptual metrics tailored to percussive audio.