LeVo: High-Quality Song Generation with Multi-Preference Alignment

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and audio language models have significantly improved music generation, particularly in lyrics-to-song generation. However, existing approaches still struggle with the complex composition of songs and the scarcity of high-quality data, leading to limitations in sound quality, musicality, instruction following, and vocal-instrument harmony. To address these challenges, we introduce LeVo, an LM-based framework consisting of LeLM and a music codec. LeLM is capable of parallelly modeling two types of tokens: mixed tokens, which represent the combined audio of vocals and accompaniment to achieve vocal-instrument harmony, and dual-track tokens, which separately encode vocals and accompaniment for high-quality song generation. It employs two decoder-only transformers and a modular extension training strategy to prevent interference between different token types. To further enhance musicality and instruction following, we introduce a multi-preference alignment method based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This method handles diverse human preferences through a semi-automatic data construction process and DPO post-training. Experimental results demonstrate that LeVo consistently outperforms existing methods on both objective and subjective metrics. Ablation studies further justify the effectiveness of our designs. Audio examples are available at https://levo-demo.github.io/.

An introduction to pitch strength in contemporary popular music analysis and production

Music information retrieval distinguishes between low- and high-level descriptions of music. Current generative AI models rely on text descriptions that are higher level than the controls familiar to studio musicians. Pitch strength, a low-level perceptual parameter of contemporary popular music, may be one feature that could make such AI models more suited to music production. Signal and perceptual analyses suggest that pitch strength (1) varies significantly across and inside songs; (2) contributes to both small- and large-scale structure; (3) contributes to the handling of polyphonic dissonance; and (4) may be a feature of upper harmonics made audible in a perspective of perceptual richness.

Mamba-Diffusion Model with Learnable Wavelet for Controllable Symbolic Music Generation

The recent surge in the popularity of diffusion models for image synthesis has attracted new attention to their potential for generation tasks in other domains. However, their applications to symbolic music generation remain largely under-explored because symbolic music is typically represented as sequences of discrete events and standard diffusion models are not well-suited for discrete data. We represent symbolic music as image-like pianorolls, facilitating the use of diffusion models for the generation of symbolic music. Moreover, this study introduces a novel diffusion model that incorporates our proposed Transformer-Mamba block and learnable wavelet transform. Classifier-free guidance is utilised to generate symbolic music with target chords. Our evaluation shows that our method achieves compelling results in terms of music quality and controllability, outperforming the strong baseline in pianoroll generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/jinchengzhanggg/proffusion.

Moonbeam: A MIDI Foundation Model Using Both Absolute and Relative Music Attributes

Moonbeam is a transformer-based foundation model for symbolic music, pretrained on a large and diverse collection of MIDI data totaling 81.6K hours of music and 18 billion tokens. Moonbeam incorporates music-domain inductive biases by capturing both absolute and relative musical attributes through the introduction of a novel domain-knowledge-inspired tokenization method and Multidimensional Relative Attention (MRA), which captures relative music information without additional trainable parameters. Leveraging the pretrained Moonbeam, we propose 2 finetuning architectures with full anticipatory capabilities, targeting 2 categories of downstream tasks: symbolic music understanding and conditional music generation (including music infilling). Our model outperforms other large-scale pretrained music models in most cases in terms of accuracy and F1 score across 3 downstream music classification tasks on 4 datasets. Moreover, our finetuned conditional music generation model outperforms a strong transformer baseline with a REMI-like tokenizer. We open-source the code, pretrained model, and generated samples on Github.

MixAssist: An Audio-Language Dataset for Co-Creative AI Assistance in Music Mixing

While AI presents significant potential for enhancing music mixing and mastering workflows, current research predominantly emphasizes end-to-end automation or generation, often overlooking the collaborative and instructional dimensions vital for co-creative processes. This gap leaves artists, particularly amateurs seeking to develop expertise, underserved. To bridge this, we introduce MixAssist, a novel audio-language dataset capturing the situated, multi-turn dialogue between expert and amateur music producers during collaborative mixing sessions. Comprising 431 audio-grounded conversational turns derived from 7 in-depth sessions involving 12 producers, MixAssist provides a unique resource for training and evaluating audio-language models that can comprehend and respond to the complexities of real-world music production dialogues. Our evaluations, including automated LLM-as-a-judge assessments and human expert comparisons, demonstrate that fine-tuning models such as Qwen-Audio on MixAssist can yield promising results, with Qwen significantly outperforming other tested models in generating helpful, contextually relevant mixing advice. By focusing on co-creative instruction grounded in audio context, MixAssist enables the development of intelligent AI assistants designed to support and augment the creative process in music mixing.

LEGATO: Large-scale End-to-end Generalizable Approach to Typeset OMR

We propose Legato, a new end-to-end transformer model for optical music recognition (OMR). Legato is the first large-scale pretrained OMR model capable of recognizing full-page or multi-page typeset music scores and the first to generate documents in ABC notation, a concise, human-readable format for symbolic music. Bringing together a pretrained vision encoder with an ABC decoder trained on a dataset of more than 214K images, our model exhibits the strong ability to generalize across various typeset scores. We conduct experiments on a range of datasets and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Given the lack of a standardized evaluation for end-to-end OMR, we comprehensively compare our model against the previous state of the art using a diverse set of metrics.

Techniques for Quantum-Computing-Aided Algorithmic Composition: Experiments in Rhythm, Timbre, Harmony, and Space

Quantum computing can be employed in computer-aided music composition to control various attributes of the music at different structural levels. This article describes the application of quantum simulation to model compositional decision making, the simulation of quantum particle tracking to produce noise-based timbres, the use of basis state vector rotation to cause changing probabilistic behaviors in granular harmonic textures, and the exploitation of quantum measurement error to cause noisy perturbations of spatial soundpaths. We describe the concepts fundamental to these techniques, we provide algorithms and software enacting them, and we provide examples demonstrating their implementation in computer-generated music.

Reimagining Dance: Real-time Music Co-creation between Dancers and AI

Dance performance traditionally follows a unidirectional relationship where movement responds to music. While AI has advanced in various creative domains, its application in dance has primarily focused on generating choreography from musical input. We present a system that enables dancers to dynamically shape musical environments through their movements. Our multi-modal architecture creates a coherent musical composition by intelligently combining pre-recorded musical clips in response to dance movements, establishing a bidirectional creative partnership where dancers function as both performers and composers. Through correlation analysis of performance data, we demonstrate emergent communication patterns between movement qualities and audio features. This approach reconceptualizes the role of AI in performing arts as a responsive collaborator that expands possibilities for both professional dance performance and improvisational artistic expression across broader populations.

SmoothSinger: A Conditional Diffusion Model for Singing Voice Synthesis with Multi-Resolution Architecture

Singing voice synthesis (SVS) aims to generate expressive and high-quality vocals from musical scores, requiring precise modeling of pitch, duration, and articulation. While diffusion-based models have achieved remarkable success in image and video generation, their application to SVS remains challenging due to the complex acoustic and musical characteristics of singing, often resulting in artifacts that degrade naturalness. In this work, we propose SmoothSinger, a conditional diffusion model designed to synthesize high quality and natural singing voices. Unlike prior methods that depend on vocoders as a final stage and often introduce distortion, SmoothSinger refines low-quality synthesized audio directly in a unified framework, mitigating the degradation associated with two-stage pipelines. The model adopts a reference-guided dual-branch architecture, using low-quality audio from any baseline system as a reference to guide the denoising process, enabling more expressive and context-aware synthesis. Furthermore, it enhances the conventional U-Net with a parallel low-frequency upsampling path, allowing the model to better capture pitch contours and long term spectral dependencies. To improve alignment during training, we replace reference audio with degraded ground truth audio, addressing temporal mismatch between reference and target signals. Experiments on the Opencpop dataset, a large-scale Chinese singing corpus, demonstrate that SmoothSinger achieves state-of-the-art results in both objective and subjective evaluations. Extensive ablation studies confirm its effectiveness in reducing artifacts and improving the naturalness of synthesized voices.

How Animals Dance (When You're Not Looking)

We present a keyframe-based framework for generating music-synchronized, choreography aware animal dance videos. Starting from a few keyframes representing distinct animal poses -- generated via text-to-image prompting or GPT-4o -- we formulate dance synthesis as a graph optimization problem: find the optimal keyframe structure that satisfies a specified choreography pattern of beats, which can be automatically estimated from a reference dance video. We also introduce an approach for mirrored pose image generation, essential for capturing symmetry in dance. In-between frames are synthesized using an video diffusion model. With as few as six input keyframes, our method can produce up to 30 second dance videos across a wide range of animals and music tracks.