Sound2Hap: Learning Audio-to-Vibrotactile Haptic Generation from Human Ratings

Environmental sounds like footsteps, keyboard typing, or dog barking carry rich information and emotional context, making them valuable for designing haptics in user applications. Existing audio-to-vibration methods, however, rely on signal-processing rules tuned for music or games and often fail to generalize across diverse sounds. To address this, we first investigated user perception of four existing audio-to-haptic algorithms, then created a data-driven model for environmental sounds. In Study 1, 34 participants rated vibrations generated by the four algorithms for 1,000 sounds, revealing no consistent algorithm preferences. Using this dataset, we trained Sound2Hap, a CNN-based autoencoder, to generate perceptually meaningful vibrations from diverse sounds with low latency. In Study 2, 15 participants rated its output higher than signal-processing baselines on both audio-vibration match and Haptic Experience Index (HXI), finding it more harmonious with diverse sounds. This work demonstrates a perceptually validated approach to audio-haptic translation, broadening the reach of sound-driven haptics.

DARC: Drum accompaniment generation with fine-grained rhythm control

In music creation, rapid prototyping is essential for exploring and refining ideas, yet existing generative tools often fall short when users require both structural control and stylistic flexibility. Prior approaches in stem-to-stem generation can condition on other musical stems but offer limited control over rhythm, and timbre-transfer methods allow users to specify specific rhythms, but cannot condition on musical context. We introduce DARC, a generative drum accompaniment model that conditions both on musical context from other stems and explicit rhythm prompts such as beatboxing or tapping tracks. Using parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we augment STAGE, a state-of-the-art drum stem generator, with fine-grained rhythm control while maintaining musical context awareness.

A Versatile Multimodal Agent for Multimedia Content Generation

With the advancement of AIGC (AI-generated content) technologies, an increasing number of generative models are revolutionizing fields such as video editing, music generation, and even film production. However, due to the limitations of current AIGC models, most models can only serve as individual components within specific application scenarios and are not capable of completing tasks end-to-end in real-world applications. In real-world applications, editing experts often work with a wide variety of images and video inputs, producing multimodal outputs -- a video typically includes audio, text, and other elements. This level of integration across multiple modalities is something current models are unable to achieve effectively. However, the rise of agent-based systems has made it possible to use AI tools to tackle complex content generation tasks. To deal with the complex scenarios, in this paper, we propose a MultiMedia-Agent designed to automate complex content creation. Our agent system includes a data generation pipeline, a tool library for content creation, and a set of metrics for evaluating preference alignment. Notably, we introduce the skill acquisition theory to model the training data curation and agent training. We designed a two-stage correlation strategy for plan optimization, including self-correlation and model preference correlation. Additionally, we utilized the generated plans to train the MultiMedia-Agent via a three stage approach including base/success plan finetune and preference optimization. The comparison results demonstrate that the our approaches are effective and the MultiMedia-Agent can generate better multimedia content compared to novel models.

Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control

Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, while academic research remains largely non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data, hindering fair comparison and progress. To this end, we release a fully open-source system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning, including a licensed synthetic dataset, training and evaluation pipelines, and Muse, an easy-to-deploy song generation model. The dataset consists of 116k fully licensed synthetic songs with automatically generated lyrics and style descriptions paired with audio synthesized by SunoV5. We train Muse via single-stage supervised finetuning of a Qwen-based language model extended with discrete audio tokens using MuCodec, without task-specific losses, auxiliary objectives, or additional architectural components. Our evaluations find that although Muse is trained with a modest data scale and model size, it achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text--music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality, while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. All data, model weights, and training and evaluation pipelines will be publicly released, paving the way for continued progress in controllable long-form song generation research. The project repository is available at https://github.com/yuhui1038/Muse.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Membership Inference on Generative Music

Generative AI systems are quickly improving, now able to produce believable output in several modalities including images, text, and audio. However, this fast development has prompted increased scrutiny concerning user privacy and the use of copyrighted works in training. A recent attack on machine-learning models called membership inference lies at the crossroads of these two concerns. The attack is given as input a set of records and a trained model and seeks to identify which of those records may have been used to train the model. On one hand, this attack can be used to identify user data used to train a model, which may violate their privacy especially in sensitive applications such as models trained on medical data. On the other hand, this attack can be used by rights-holders as evidence that a company used their works without permission to train a model. Remarkably, it appears that no work has studied the effect of membership inference attacks (MIA) on generative music. Given that the music industry is worth billions of dollars and artists would stand to gain from being able to determine if their works were being used without permission, we believe this is a pressing issue to study. As such, in this work we begin a preliminary study into whether MIAs are effective on generative music. We study the effect of several existing attacks on MuseGAN, a popular and influential generative music model. Similar to prior work on generative audio MIAs, our findings suggest that music data is fairly resilient to known membership inference techniques.

Predictive Controlled Music

This paper presents a new approach to algorithmic composition, called predictive controlled music (PCM), which combines model predictive control (MPC) with music generation. PCM uses dynamic models to predict and optimize the music generation process, where musical notes are computed in a manner similar to an MPC problem by optimizing a performance measure. A feedforward neural network-based assessment function is used to evaluate the generated musical score, which serves as the objective function of the PCM optimization problem. Furthermore, a recurrent neural network model is employed to capture the relationships among the variables in the musical notes, and this model is then used to define the constraints in the PCM. Similar to MPC, the proposed PCM computes musical notes in a receding-horizon manner, leading to feedback controlled prediction. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the PCM generation method.

SongSage: A Large Musical Language Model with Lyric Generative Pre-training

Large language models have achieved significant success in various domains, yet their understanding of lyric-centric knowledge has not been fully explored. In this work, we first introduce PlaylistSense, a dataset to evaluate the playlist understanding capability of language models. PlaylistSense encompasses ten types of user queries derived from common real-world perspectives, challenging LLMs to accurately grasp playlist features and address diverse user intents. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that current general-purpose LLMs still have potential for improvement in playlist understanding. Inspired by this, we introduce SongSage, a large musical language model equipped with diverse lyric-centric intelligence through lyric generative pretraining. SongSage undergoes continual pretraining on LyricBank, a carefully curated corpus of 5.48 billion tokens focused on lyrical content, followed by fine-tuning with LyricBank-SFT, a meticulously crafted instruction set comprising 775k samples across nine core lyric-centric tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SongSage exhibits a strong understanding of lyric-centric knowledge, excels in rewriting user queries for zero-shot playlist recommendations, generates and continues lyrics effectively, and performs proficiently across seven additional capabilities. Beyond its lyric-centric expertise, SongSage also retains general knowledge comprehension and achieves a competitive MMLU score. We will keep the datasets inaccessible due to copyright restrictions and release the SongSage and training script to ensure reproducibility and support music AI research and applications, the datasets release plan details are provided in the appendix.

Do You Have Freestyle? Expressive Humanoid Locomotion via Audio Control

Humans intuitively move to sound, but current humanoid robots lack expressive improvisational capabilities, confined to predefined motions or sparse commands. Generating motion from audio and then retargeting it to robots relies on explicit motion reconstruction, leading to cascaded errors, high latency, and disjointed acoustic-actuation mapping. We propose RoboPerform, the first unified audio-to-locomotion framework that can directly generate music-driven dance and speech-driven co-speech gestures from audio. Guided by the core principle of "motion = content + style", the framework treats audio as implicit style signals and eliminates the need for explicit motion reconstruction. RoboPerform integrates a ResMoE teacher policy for adapting to diverse motion patterns and a diffusion-based student policy for audio style injection. This retargeting-free design ensures low latency and high fidelity. Experimental validation shows that RoboPerform achieves promising results in physical plausibility and audio alignment, successfully transforming robots into responsive performers capable of reacting to audio.

Tempo as the Stable Cue: Hierarchical Mixture of Tempo and Beat Experts for Music to 3D Dance Generation

Music to 3D dance generation aims to synthesize realistic and rhythmically synchronized human dance from music. While existing methods often rely on additional genre labels to further improve dance generation, such labels are typically noisy, coarse, unavailable, or insufficient to capture the diversity of real-world music, which can result in rhythm misalignment or stylistic drift. In contrast, we observe that tempo, a core property reflecting musical rhythm and pace, remains relatively consistent across datasets and genres, typically ranging from 60 to 200 BPM. Based on this finding, we propose TempoMoE, a hierarchical tempo-aware Mixture-of-Experts module that enhances the diffusion model and its rhythm perception. TempoMoE organizes motion experts into tempo-structured groups for different tempo ranges, with multi-scale beat experts capturing fine- and long-range rhythmic dynamics. A Hierarchical Rhythm-Adaptive Routing dynamically selects and fuses experts from music features, enabling flexible, rhythm-aligned generation without manual genre labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TempoMoE achieves state-of-the-art results in dance quality and rhythm alignment.

Selective Imperfection as a Generative Framework for Analysis, Creativity and Discovery

We introduce materiomusic as a generative framework linking the hierarchical structures of matter with the compositional logic of music. Across proteins, spider webs and flame dynamics, vibrational and architectural principles recur as tonal hierarchies, harmonic progressions, and long-range musical form. Using reversible mappings, from molecular spectra to musical tones and from three-dimensional networks to playable instruments, we show how sound functions as a scientific probe, an epistemic inversion where listening becomes a mode of seeing and musical composition becomes a blueprint for matter. These mappings excavate deep time: patterns originating in femtosecond molecular vibrations or billion-year evolutionary histories become audible. We posit that novelty in science and art emerges when constraints cannot be satisfied within existing degrees of freedom, forcing expansion of the space of viable configurations. Selective imperfection provides the mechanism restoring balance between coherence and adaptability. Quantitative support comes from exhaustive enumeration of all 2^12 musical scales, revealing that culturally significant systems cluster in a mid-entropy, mid-defect corridor, directly paralleling the Hall-Petch optimum where intermediate defect densities maximize material strength. Iterating these mappings creates productive collisions between human creativity and physics, generating new information as musical structures encounter evolutionary constraints. We show how swarm-based AI models compose music exhibiting human-like structural signatures such as small-world connectivity, modular integration, long-range coherence, suggesting a route beyond interpolation toward invention. We show that science and art are generative acts of world-building under constraint, with vibration as a shared grammar organizing structure across scales.