Expressive Timing in Hindustani Vocal Music

Temporal dynamics are among the cues to expres siveness in music performance in different cultures. In the case of Hindustani music, it is well known that expert vocalists often take liberties with the beat, intentionally not aligning their singing precisely with the relatively steady beat provided by the accompanying tabla. This becomes evident when comparing performances of the same composition such as a bandish. We present a methodology for the quantitative study of differences across performed pieces using computational techniques. This is applied to small study of two performances of a popular bandish in raga Yaman, to demonstrate how we can effectively capture the nuances of timing variations that bring out stylistic constraints along with the individual signature of a performer. This work articulates an important step towards the broader goals of music analysis and generative modelling for Indian classical music performance.

Tune It Up: Music Genre Transfer and Prediction

Deep generative models have been used in style transfer tasks for images. In this study, we adapt and improve CycleGAN model to perform music style transfer on Jazz and Classic genres. By doing so, we aim to easily generate new songs, cover music to different music genres and reduce the arrangements needed in those processes. We train and use music genre classifier to assess the performance of the transfer models. To that end, we obtain 87.7% accuracy with Multi-layer Perceptron algorithm. To improve our style transfer baseline, we add auxiliary discriminators and triplet loss to our model. According to our experiments, we obtain the best accuracies as 69.4% in Jazz to Classic task and 39.3% in Classic to Jazz task with our developed genre classifier. We also run a subjective experiment and results of it show that the overall performance of our transfer model is good and it manages to conserve melody of inputs on the transferred outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/ fidansamet/tune-it-up

AudioX: Diffusion Transformer for Anything-to-Audio Generation

Audio and music generation have emerged as crucial tasks in many applications, yet existing approaches face significant limitations: they operate in isolation without unified capabilities across modalities, suffer from scarce high-quality, multi-modal training data, and struggle to effectively integrate diverse inputs. In this work, we propose AudioX, a unified Diffusion Transformer model for Anything-to-Audio and Music Generation. Unlike previous domain-specific models, AudioX can generate both general audio and music with high quality, while offering flexible natural language control and seamless processing of various modalities including text, video, image, music, and audio. Its key innovation is a multi-modal masked training strategy that masks inputs across modalities and forces the model to learn from masked inputs, yielding robust and unified cross-modal representations. To address data scarcity, we curate two comprehensive datasets: vggsound-caps with 190K audio captions based on the VGGSound dataset, and V2M-caps with 6 million music captions derived from the V2M dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AudioX not only matches or outperforms state-of-the-art specialized models, but also offers remarkable versatility in handling diverse input modalities and generation tasks within a unified architecture. The code and datasets will be available at https://zeyuet.github.io/AudioX/

Evaluating the Impact of AI-Powered Audiovisual Personalization on Learner Emotion, Focus, and Learning Outcomes

Independent learners often struggle with sustaining focus and emotional regulation in unstructured or distracting settings. Although some rely on ambient aids such as music, ASMR, or visual backgrounds to support concentration, these tools are rarely integrated into cohesive, learner-centered systems. Moreover, existing educational technologies focus primarily on content adaptation and feedback, overlooking the emotional and sensory context in which learning takes place. Large language models have demonstrated powerful multimodal capabilities including the ability to generate and adapt text, audio, and visual content. Educational research has yet to fully explore their potential in creating personalized audiovisual learning environments. To address this gap, we introduce an AI-powered system that uses LLMs to generate personalized multisensory study environments. Users select or generate customized visual themes (e.g., abstract vs. realistic, static vs. animated) and auditory elements (e.g., white noise, ambient ASMR, familiar vs. novel sounds) to create immersive settings aimed at reducing distraction and enhancing emotional stability. Our primary research question investigates how combinations of personalized audiovisual elements affect learner cognitive load and engagement. Using a mixed-methods design that incorporates biometric measures and performance outcomes, this study evaluates the effectiveness of LLM-driven sensory personalization. The findings aim to advance emotionally responsive educational technologies and extend the application of multimodal LLMs into the sensory dimension of self-directed learning.

DRAGON: Distributional Rewards Optimize Diffusion Generative Models

We present Distributional RewArds for Generative OptimizatioN (DRAGON), a versatile framework for fine-tuning media generation models towards a desired outcome. Compared with traditional reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) or pairwise preference approaches such as direct preference optimization (DPO), DRAGON is more flexible. It can optimize reward functions that evaluate either individual examples or distributions of them, making it compatible with a broad spectrum of instance-wise, instance-to-distribution, and distribution-to-distribution rewards. Leveraging this versatility, we construct novel reward functions by selecting an encoder and a set of reference examples to create an exemplar distribution. When cross-modality encoders such as CLAP are used, the reference examples may be of a different modality (e.g., text versus audio). Then, DRAGON gathers online and on-policy generations, scores them to construct a positive demonstration set and a negative set, and leverages the contrast between the two sets to maximize the reward. For evaluation, we fine-tune an audio-domain text-to-music diffusion model with 20 different reward functions, including a custom music aesthetics model, CLAP score, Vendi diversity, and Frechet audio distance (FAD). We further compare instance-wise (per-song) and full-dataset FAD settings while ablating multiple FAD encoders and reference sets. Over all 20 target rewards, DRAGON achieves an 81.45% average win rate. Moreover, reward functions based on exemplar sets indeed enhance generations and are comparable to model-based rewards. With an appropriate exemplar set, DRAGON achieves a 60.95% human-voted music quality win rate without training on human preference annotations. As such, DRAGON exhibits a new approach to designing and optimizing reward functions for improving human-perceived quality. Sound examples at https://ml-dragon.github.io/web.

NotaGen: Advancing Musicality in Symbolic Music Generation with Large Language Model Training Paradigms

We introduce NotaGen, a symbolic music generation model aiming to explore the potential of producing high-quality classical sheet music. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), NotaGen adopts pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning paradigms (henceforth referred to as the LLM training paradigms). It is pre-trained on 1.6M pieces of music, and then fine-tuned on approximately 9K high-quality classical compositions conditioned on "period-composer-instrumentation" prompts. For reinforcement learning, we propose the CLaMP-DPO method, which further enhances generation quality and controllability without requiring human annotations or predefined rewards. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of CLaMP-DPO in symbolic music generation models with different architectures and encoding schemes. Furthermore, subjective A/B tests show that NotaGen outperforms baseline models against human compositions, greatly advancing musical aesthetics in symbolic music generation. The project homepage is https://electricalexis.github.io/notagen-demo.

A Comprehensive Survey on Generative AI for Video-to-Music Generation

The burgeoning growth of video-to-music generation can be attributed to the ascendancy of multimodal generative models. However, there is a lack of literature that comprehensively combs through the work in this field. To fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive review of video-to-music generation using deep generative AI techniques, focusing on three key components: visual feature extraction, music generation frameworks, and conditioning mechanisms. We categorize existing approaches based on their designs for each component, clarifying the roles of different strategies. Preceding this, we provide a fine-grained classification of video and music modalities, illustrating how different categories influence the design of components within the generation pipelines. Furthermore, we summarize available multimodal datasets and evaluation metrics while highlighting ongoing challenges in the field.

CrossMuSim: A Cross-Modal Framework for Music Similarity Retrieval with LLM-Powered Text Description Sourcing and Mining

Music similarity retrieval is fundamental for managing and exploring relevant content from large collections in streaming platforms. This paper presents a novel cross-modal contrastive learning framework that leverages the open-ended nature of text descriptions to guide music similarity modeling, addressing the limitations of traditional uni-modal approaches in capturing complex musical relationships. To overcome the scarcity of high-quality text-music paired data, this paper introduces a dual-source data acquisition approach combining online scraping and LLM-based prompting, where carefully designed prompts leverage LLMs' comprehensive music knowledge to generate contextually rich descriptions. Exten1sive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing benchmarks through objective metrics, subjective evaluations, and real-world A/B testing on the Huawei Music streaming platform.

FilmComposer: LLM-Driven Music Production for Silent Film Clips

In this work, we implement music production for silent film clips using LLM-driven method. Given the strong professional demands of film music production, we propose the FilmComposer, simulating the actual workflows of professional musicians. FilmComposer is the first to combine large generative models with a multi-agent approach, leveraging the advantages of both waveform music and symbolic music generation. Additionally, FilmComposer is the first to focus on the three core elements of music production for film-audio quality, musicality, and musical development-and introduces various controls, such as rhythm, semantics, and visuals, to enhance these key aspects. Specifically, FilmComposer consists of the visual processing module, rhythm-controllable MusicGen, and multi-agent assessment, arrangement and mix. In addition, our framework can seamlessly integrate into the actual music production pipeline and allows user intervention in every step, providing strong interactivity and a high degree of creative freedom. Furthermore, we propose MusicPro-7k which includes 7,418 film clips, music, description, rhythm spots and main melody, considering the lack of a professional and high-quality film music dataset. Finally, both the standard metrics and the new specialized metrics we propose demonstrate that the music generated by our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of quality, consistency with video, diversity, musicality, and musical development. Project page: https://apple-jun.github.io/FilmComposer.github.io/

Align Your Rhythm: Generating Highly Aligned Dance Poses with Gating-Enhanced Rhythm-Aware Feature Representation

Automatically generating natural, diverse and rhythmic human dance movements driven by music is vital for virtual reality and film industries. However, generating dance that naturally follows music remains a challenge, as existing methods lack proper beat alignment and exhibit unnatural motion dynamics. In this paper, we propose Danceba, a novel framework that leverages gating mechanism to enhance rhythm-aware feature representation for music-driven dance generation, which achieves highly aligned dance poses with enhanced rhythmic sensitivity. Specifically, we introduce Phase-Based Rhythm Extraction (PRE) to precisely extract rhythmic information from musical phase data, capitalizing on the intrinsic periodicity and temporal structures of music. Additionally, we propose Temporal-Gated Causal Attention (TGCA) to focus on global rhythmic features, ensuring that dance movements closely follow the musical rhythm. We also introduce Parallel Mamba Motion Modeling (PMMM) architecture to separately model upper and lower body motions along with musical features, thereby improving the naturalness and diversity of generated dance movements. Extensive experiments confirm that Danceba outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving significantly better rhythmic alignment and motion diversity. Project page: https://danceba.github.io/ .