ReverbFX: A Dataset of Room Impulse Responses Derived from Reverb Effect Plugins for Singing Voice Dereverberation

We present ReverbFX, a new room impulse response (RIR) dataset designed for singing voice dereverberation research. Unlike existing datasets based on real recorded RIRs, ReverbFX features a diverse collection of RIRs captured from various reverb audio effect plugins commonly used in music production. We conduct comprehensive experiments using the proposed dataset to benchmark the challenge of dereverberation of singing voice recordings affected by artificial reverbs. We train two state-of-the-art generative models using ReverbFX and demonstrate that models trained with plugin-derived RIRs outperform those trained on realistic RIRs in artificial reverb scenarios.

Towards Responsible AI Music: an Investigation of Trustworthy Features for Creative Systems

Generative AI is radically changing the creative arts, by fundamentally transforming the way we create and interact with cultural artefacts. While offering unprecedented opportunities for artistic expression and commercialisation, this technology also raises ethical, societal, and legal concerns. Key among these are the potential displacement of human creativity, copyright infringement stemming from vast training datasets, and the lack of transparency, explainability, and fairness mechanisms. As generative systems become pervasive in this domain, responsible design is crucial. Whilst previous work has tackled isolated aspects of generative systems (e.g., transparency, evaluation, data), we take a comprehensive approach, grounding these efforts within the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence produced by the High-Level Expert Group on AI appointed by the European Commission - a framework for designing responsible AI systems across seven macro requirements. Focusing on generative music AI, we illustrate how these requirements can be contextualised for the field, addressing trustworthiness across multiple dimensions and integrating insights from the existing literature. We further propose a roadmap for operationalising these contextualised requirements, emphasising interdisciplinary collaboration and stakeholder engagement. Our work provides a foundation for designing and evaluating responsible music generation systems, calling for collaboration among AI experts, ethicists, legal scholars, and artists. This manuscript is accompanied by a website: https://amresearchlab.github.io/raim-framework/.

ItDPDM: Information-Theoretic Discrete Poisson Diffusion Model

Existing methods for generative modeling of discrete data, such as symbolic music tokens, face two primary challenges: (1) they either embed discrete inputs into continuous state-spaces or (2) rely on variational losses that only approximate the true negative log-likelihood. Previous efforts have individually targeted these limitations. While information-theoretic Gaussian diffusion models alleviate the suboptimality of variational losses, they still perform modeling in continuous domains. In this work, we introduce the Information-Theoretic Discrete Poisson Diffusion Model (ItDPDM), which simultaneously addresses both limitations by directly operating in a discrete state-space via a Poisson diffusion process inspired by photon arrival processes in camera sensors. We introduce a novel Poisson Reconstruction Loss (PRL) and derive an exact relationship between PRL and the true negative log-likelihood, thereby eliminating the need for approximate evidence lower bounds. Experiments conducted on the Lakh MIDI symbolic music dataset and the CIFAR-10 image benchmark demonstrate that ItDPDM delivers significant improvements, reducing test NLL by up to 80% compared to prior baselines, while also achieving faster convergence.

Text2Tracks: Prompt-based Music Recommendation via Generative Retrieval

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled users to provide highly specific music recommendation requests using natural language prompts (e.g. "Can you recommend some old classics for slow dancing?"). In this setup, the recommended tracks are predicted by the LLM in an autoregressive way, i.e. the LLM generates the track titles one token at a time. While intuitive, this approach has several limitation. First, it is based on a general purpose tokenization that is optimized for words rather than for track titles. Second, it necessitates an additional entity resolution layer that matches the track title to the actual track identifier. Third, the number of decoding steps scales linearly with the length of the track title, slowing down inference. In this paper, we propose to address the task of prompt-based music recommendation as a generative retrieval task. Within this setting, we introduce novel, effective, and efficient representations of track identifiers that significantly outperform commonly used strategies. We introduce Text2Tracks, a generative retrieval model that learns a mapping from a user's music recommendation prompt to the relevant track IDs directly. Through an offline evaluation on a dataset of playlists with language inputs, we find that (1) the strategy to create IDs for music tracks is the most important factor for the effectiveness of Text2Tracks and semantic IDs significantly outperform commonly used strategies that rely on song titles as identifiers (2) provided with the right choice of track identifiers, Text2Tracks outperforms sparse and dense retrieval solutions trained to retrieve tracks from language prompts.

Recognizing Ornaments in Vocal Indian Art Music with Active Annotation

Ornamentations, embellishments, or microtonal inflections are essential to melodic expression across many musical traditions, adding depth, nuance, and emotional impact to performances. Recognizing ornamentations in singing voices is key to MIR, with potential applications in music pedagogy, singer identification, genre classification, and controlled singing voice generation. However, the lack of annotated datasets and specialized modeling approaches remains a major obstacle for progress in this research area. In this work, we introduce R\=aga Ornamentation Detection (ROD), a novel dataset comprising Indian classical music recordings curated by expert musicians. The dataset is annotated using a custom Human-in-the-Loop tool for six vocal ornaments marked as event-based labels. Using this dataset, we develop an ornamentation detection model based on deep time-series analysis, preserving ornament boundaries during the chunking of long audio recordings. We conduct experiments using different train-test configurations within the ROD dataset and also evaluate our approach on a separate, manually annotated dataset of Indian classical concert recordings. Our experimental results support the superior performance of our proposed approach over the baseline CRNN.

The Role of Generative AI in Facilitating Social Interactions: A Scoping Review

Reduced social connectedness increasingly poses a threat to mental health, life expectancy, and general well-being. Generative AI (GAI) technologies, such as large language models (LLMs) and image generation tools, are increasingly integrated into applications aimed at enhancing human social experiences. Despite their growing presence, little is known about how these technologies influence social interactions. This scoping review investigates how GAI-based applications are currently designed to facilitate social interaction, what forms of social engagement they target, and which design and evaluation methodologies designers use to create and evaluate them. Through an analysis of 30 studies published since 2020, we identify key trends in application domains including storytelling, socio-emotional skills training, reminiscence, collaborative learning, music making, and general conversation. We highlight the role of participatory and co-design approaches in fostering both effective technology use and social engagement, while also examining socio-ethical concerns such as cultural bias and accessibility. This review underscores the potential of GAI to support dynamic and personalized interactions, but calls for greater attention to equitable design practices and inclusive evaluation strategies.

ReactDance: Progressive-Granular Representation for Long-Term Coherent Reactive Dance Generation

Reactive dance generation (RDG) produces follower movements conditioned on guiding dancer and music while ensuring spatial coordination and temporal coherence. However, existing methods overemphasize global constraints and optimization, overlooking local information, such as fine-grained spatial interactions and localized temporal context. Therefore, we present ReactDance, a novel diffusion-based framework for high-fidelity RDG with long-term coherence and multi-scale controllability. Unlike existing methods that struggle with interaction fidelity, synchronization, and temporal consistency in duet synthesis, our approach introduces two key innovations: 1)Group Residual Finite Scalar Quantization (GRFSQ), a multi-scale disentangled motion representation that captures interaction semantics from coarse body rhythms to fine-grained joint dynamics, and 2)Blockwise Local Context (BLC), a sampling strategy eliminating error accumulation in long sequence generation via local block causal masking and periodic positional encoding. Built on the decoupled multi-scale GRFSQ representation, we implement a diffusion model withLayer-Decoupled Classifier-free Guidance (LDCFG), allowing granular control over motion semantics across scales. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that ReactDance surpasses existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

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

SwitchCodec: A High-Fidelity Nerual Audio Codec With Sparse Quantization

We present a universal high-fidelity neural audio compression algorithm that can compress speech, music, and general audio below 3 kbps bandwidth. Although current state-of-the-art audio codecs excel in audio compression, their effectiveness significantly declines when embedding space is sharply reduced, which corresponds to higher compression. To address this problem, we propose Residual Experts Vector Quantization (REVQ), which significantly expands the available embedding space and improves the performance while hardly sacrificing the bandwidth. Furthermore, we introduce a strategy to ensure that the vast embedding space can be fully utilized. Additionally, we propose a STFT-based discriminator to guide the generator in producing indistinguishable spectrograms. We demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms baseline methods through detailed ablations.