SongSong: A Time Phonograph for Chinese SongCi Music from Thousand of Years Away

Recently, there have been significant advancements in music generation. However, existing models primarily focus on creating modern pop songs, making it challenging to produce ancient music with distinct rhythms and styles, such as ancient Chinese SongCi. In this paper, we introduce SongSong, the first music generation model capable of restoring Chinese SongCi to our knowledge. Our model first predicts the melody from the input SongCi, then separately generates the singing voice and accompaniment based on that melody, and finally combines all elements to create the final piece of music. Additionally, to address the lack of ancient music datasets, we create OpenSongSong, a comprehensive dataset of ancient Chinese SongCi music, featuring 29.9 hours of compositions by various renowned SongCi music masters. To assess SongSong's proficiency in performing SongCi, we randomly select 85 SongCi sentences that were not part of the training set for evaluation against SongSong and music generation platforms such as Suno and SkyMusic. The subjective and objective outcomes indicate that our proposed model achieves leading performance in generating high-quality SongCi music.

Enhancing Music Recommendation with User Mood Input

Recommendation systems have become essential in modern music streaming platforms, due to the vast amount of content available. A common approach in recommendation systems is collaborative filtering, which suggests content to users based on the preferences of others with similar patterns. However, this method performs poorly in domains where interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Prior work has explored a range of content-filtering techniques for music, including genre classification, instrument detection, and lyrics analysis. In the literature review component of this work, we examine these methods in detail. Music emotion recognition is a type of content-based filtering that is less explored but has significant potential. Since a user's emotional state influences their musical choices, incorporating user mood into recommendation systems is an alternative way to personalize the listening experience. In this study, we explore a mood-assisted recommendation system that suggests songs based on the desired mood using the energy-valence spectrum. Single-blind experiments are conducted, in which participants are presented with two recommendations (one generated from a mood-assisted recommendation system and one from a baseline system) and are asked to rate them. Results show that integrating user mood leads to a statistically significant improvement in recommendation quality, highlighting the potential of such approaches.

ALARM: Audio-Language Alignment for Reasoning Models

Large audio language models (ALMs) extend LLMs with auditory understanding. A common approach freezes the LLM and trains only an adapter on self-generated targets. However, this fails for reasoning LLMs (RLMs) whose built-in chain-of-thought traces expose the textual surrogate input, yielding unnatural responses. We propose self-rephrasing, converting self-generated responses into audio-understanding variants compatible with RLMs while preserving distributional alignment. We further fuse and compress multiple audio encoders for stronger representations. For training, we construct a 6M-instance multi-task corpus (2.5M unique prompts) spanning 19K hours of speech, music, and sound. Our 4B-parameter ALM outperforms similarly sized models and surpasses most larger ALMs on related audio-reasoning benchmarks, while preserving textual capabilities with a low training cost. Notably, we achieve the best open-source result on the MMAU-speech and MMSU benchmarks and rank third among all the models.

Voices of Civilizations: A Multilingual QA Benchmark for Global Music Understanding

We introduce Voices of Civilizations, the first multilingual QA benchmark for evaluating audio LLMs' cultural comprehension on full-length music recordings. Covering 380 tracks across 38 languages, our automated pipeline yields 1,190 multiple-choice questions through four stages - each followed by manual verification: 1) compiling a representative music list; 2) generating cultural-background documents for each sample in the music list via LLMs; 3) extracting key attributes from those documents; and 4) constructing multiple-choice questions probing language, region associations, mood, and thematic content. We evaluate models under four conditions and report per-language accuracy. Our findings demonstrate that even state-of-the-art audio LLMs struggle to capture subtle cultural nuances without rich textual context and exhibit systematic biases in interpreting music from different cultural traditions. The dataset is publicly available on Hugging Face to foster culturally inclusive music understanding research.

Art2Mus: Artwork-to-Music Generation via Visual Conditioning and Large-Scale Cross-Modal Alignment

Music generation has advanced markedly through multimodal deep learning, enabling models to synthesize audio from text and, more recently, from images. However, existing image-conditioned systems suffer from two fundamental limitations: (i) they are typically trained on natural photographs, limiting their ability to capture the richer semantic, stylistic, and cultural content of artworks; and (ii) most rely on an image-to-text conversion stage, using language as a semantic shortcut that simplifies conditioning but prevents direct visual-to-audio learning. Motivated by these gaps, we introduce ArtSound, a large-scale multimodal dataset of 105,884 artwork-music pairs enriched with dual-modality captions, obtained by extending ArtGraph and the Free Music Archive. We further propose ArtToMus, the first framework explicitly designed for direct artwork-to-music generation, which maps digitized artworks to music without image-to-text translation or language-based semantic supervision. The framework projects visual embeddings into the conditioning space of a latent diffusion model, enabling music synthesis guided solely by visual information. Experimental results show that ArtToMus generates musically coherent and stylistically consistent outputs that reflect salient visual cues of the source artworks. While absolute alignment scores remain lower than those of text-conditioned systems-as expected given the substantially increased difficulty of removing linguistic supervision-ArtToMus achieves competitive perceptual quality and meaningful cross-modal correspondence. This work establishes direct visual-to-music generation as a distinct and challenging research direction, and provides resources that support applications in multimedia art, cultural heritage, and AI-assisted creative practice. Code and dataset will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Automatic End-to-End Data Integration using Large Language Models

Designing data integration pipelines typically requires substantial manual effort from data engineers to configure pipeline components and label training data. While LLMs have shown promise in handling individual steps of the integration process, their potential to replace all human input across end-to-end data integration pipelines has not been investigated. As a step toward exploring this potential, we present an automatic data integration pipeline that uses GPT-5.2 to generate all artifacts required to adapt the pipeline to specific use cases. These artifacts are schema mappings, value mappings for data normalization, training data for entity matching, and validation data for selecting conflict resolution heuristics in data fusion. We compare the performance of this LLM-based pipeline to the performance of human-designed pipelines along three case studies requiring the integration of video game, music, and company related data. Our experiments show that the LLM-based pipeline is able to produce similar results, for some tasks even better results, as the human-designed pipelines. End-to-end, the human and the LLM pipelines produce integrated datasets of comparable size and density. Having the LLM configure the pipelines costs approximately \$10 per case study, which represents only a small fraction of the cost of having human data engineers perform the same tasks.

Evaluating Disentangled Representations for Controllable Music Generation

Recent approaches in music generation rely on disentangled representations, often labeled as structure and timbre or local and global, to enable controllable synthesis. Yet the underlying properties of these embeddings remain underexplored. In this work, we evaluate such disentangled representations in a set of music audio models for controllable generation using a probing-based framework that goes beyond standard downstream tasks. The selected models reflect diverse unsupervised disentanglement strategies, including inductive biases, data augmentations, adversarial objectives, and staged training procedures. We further isolate specific strategies to analyze their effect. Our analysis spans four key axes: informativeness, equivariance, invariance, and disentanglement, which are assessed across datasets, tasks, and controlled transformations. Our findings reveal inconsistencies between intended and actual semantics of the embeddings, suggesting that current strategies fall short of producing truly disentangled representations, and prompting a re-examination of how controllability is approached in music generation.

A Harmony Composition-Inspired Tensor Modalization Method for Near-Field IRS Channel Estimation

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are poised to revolutionize next-generation wireless communication systems by enhancing channel quality and spectrum efficiency through advanced wave manipulation. However, extremely large-scale IRS {(XL-IRS)} deployments face significant challenges in channel estimation due to multiplicative path loss and near-field (NF) effects, where spherical wavefronts couple distance and angle parameters. Existing polar-domain codebook-based compressive sensing methods for NF channel estimation suffer from low accuracy and high complexity, caused by the need for high-resolution grids of both distance and angle parameters. To address this, we propose a harmonic processing-inspired channel estimation framework for NF {XL-IRS} systems by leveraging tensor modalization to decouple channel parameters. Drawing an analogy to musical harmonic analysis, our approach decomposes the high-dimensional NF channel tensor into independent factor matrices, modeled as ``chords," representing distance and angle parameters. Through harmonic analysis-inspired distance parameter decoupling, we design a compact, distance-dependent codebook that enables high-resolution NF channel parameter estimation. This approach significantly reduces the codebook size compared to polar-domain methods. {Then, we} derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) to evaluate the estimators. Finally, simulation results show an 8.5 dB improvement in normalized mean square error (NMSE) compared to conventional methods, underscoring its low complexity and high accuracy.

Depth-Structured Music Recurrence: Budgeted Recurrent Attention for Full-Piece Symbolic Music Modeling

Long-context modeling is essential for symbolic music generation, since motif repetition and developmental variation can span thousands of musical events. However, practical composition and performance workflows frequently rely on resource-limited devices (e.g., electronic instruments and portable computers), making heavy memory and attention computation difficult to deploy. We introduce Depth-Structured Music Recurrence (DSMR), a recurrent long-context Transformer for full-piece symbolic music modeling that extends context beyond fixed-length excerpts via segment-level recurrence with detached cross-segment states, featuring a layer-wise memory-horizon schedule that budgets recurrent KV states across depth. DSMR is trained in a single left-to-right pass over each complete composition, akin to how a musician experiences it from beginning to end, while carrying recurrent cross-segment states forward. Within this recurrent framework, we systematically study how depth-wise horizon allocations affect optimization, best-checkpoint perplexity, and efficiency. By allocating different history-window lengths across layers while keeping the total recurrent-state budget fixed, DSMR creates depth-dependent temporal receptive fields within a recurrent attention stack without reducing compute depth. Our main instantiation is a two-scale DSMR schedule that allocates long history windows to lower layers and a uniform short window to the remaining layers. Experiments on the piano performance dataset MAESTRO demonstrate that two-scale DSMR provides a practical quality--efficiency recipe for full-length long-context symbolic music modeling with recurrent attention under limited computational resources.

DashengTokenizer: One layer is enough for unified audio understanding and generation

This paper introduces DashengTokenizer, a continuous audio tokenizer engineered for joint use in both understanding and generation tasks. Unlike conventional approaches, which train acoustic tokenizers and subsequently integrate frozen semantic knowledge, our method inverts this paradigm: we leverage frozen semantic features and inject acoustic information. In linear evaluation across 22 diverse tasks, our method outperforms previous audio codec and audio encoder baselines by a significant margin while maintaining competitive audio reconstruction quality. Notably, we demonstrate that this acoustic injection improves performance for tasks such as speech emotion recognition, music understanding, and acoustic scene classification. We further evaluate the tokenizer's generative performance on text-to-audio (TTA), text-to-music (TTM), and speech enhancement (SE). Our approach surpasses standard variational autoencoder (VAE)-based methods on TTA and TTM tasks, while its effectiveness on SE underscores its capabilities as a general-purpose audio encoder. Finally, our results challenge the prevailing assumption that VAE-based architectures are a prerequisite for audio synthesis. Checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/mispeech/dashengtokenizer.