Do Music Preferences Reflect Cultural Values? A Cross-National Analysis Using Music Embedding and World Values Survey

This study explores the extent to which national music preferences reflect underlying cultural values. We collected long-term popular music data from YouTube Music Charts across 62 countries, encompassing both Western and non-Western regions, and extracted audio embeddings using the CLAP model. To complement these quantitative representations, we generated semantic captions for each track using LP-MusicCaps and GPT-based summarization. Countries were clustered based on contrastive embeddings that highlight deviations from global musical norms. The resulting clusters were projected into a two-dimensional space via t-SNE for visualization and evaluated against cultural zones defined by the World Values Survey (WVS). Statistical analyses, including MANOVA and chi-squared tests, confirmed that music-based clusters exhibit significant alignment with established cultural groupings. Furthermore, residual analysis revealed consistent patterns of overrepresentation, suggesting non-random associations between specific clusters and cultural zones. These findings indicate that national-level music preferences encode meaningful cultural signals and can serve as a proxy for understanding global cultural boundaries.

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.

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.

Audio-Sync Video Generation with Multi-Stream Temporal Control

Audio is inherently temporal and closely synchronized with the visual world, making it a naturally aligned and expressive control signal for controllable video generation (e.g., movies). Beyond control, directly translating audio into video is essential for understanding and visualizing rich audio narratives (e.g., Podcasts or historical recordings). However, existing approaches fall short in generating high-quality videos with precise audio-visual synchronization, especially across diverse and complex audio types. In this work, we introduce MTV, a versatile framework for audio-sync video generation. MTV explicitly separates audios into speech, effects, and music tracks, enabling disentangled control over lip motion, event timing, and visual mood, respectively -- resulting in fine-grained and semantically aligned video generation. To support the framework, we additionally present DEMIX, a dataset comprising high-quality cinematic videos and demixed audio tracks. DEMIX is structured into five overlapped subsets, enabling scalable multi-stage training for diverse generation scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTV achieves state-of-the-art performance across six standard metrics spanning video quality, text-video consistency, and audio-video alignment. Project page: https://hjzheng.net/projects/MTV/.

MEGADance: Mixture-of-Experts Architecture for Genre-Aware 3D Dance Generation

Music-driven 3D dance generation has attracted increasing attention in recent years, with promising applications in choreography, virtual reality, and creative content creation. Previous research has generated promising realistic dance movement from audio signals. However, traditional methods underutilize genre conditioning, often treating it as auxiliary modifiers rather than core semantic drivers. This oversight compromises music-motion synchronization and disrupts dance genre continuity, particularly during complex rhythmic transitions, thereby leading to visually unsatisfactory effects. To address the challenge, we propose MEGADance, a novel architecture for music-driven 3D dance generation. By decoupling choreographic consistency into dance generality and genre specificity, MEGADance demonstrates significant dance quality and strong genre controllability. It consists of two stages: (1) High-Fidelity Dance Quantization Stage (HFDQ), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) and reconstructs them with kinematic-dynamic constraints, and (2) Genre-Aware Dance Generation Stage (GADG), which maps music into the latent representation by synergistic utilization of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism with Mamba-Transformer hybrid backbone. Extensive experiments on the FineDance and AIST++ dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of MEGADance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code will be released upon acceptance.

MatchDance: Collaborative Mamba-Transformer Architecture Matching for High-Quality 3D Dance Synthesis

Music-to-dance generation represents a challenging yet pivotal task at the intersection of choreography, virtual reality, and creative content generation. Despite its significance, existing methods face substantial limitation in achieving choreographic consistency. To address the challenge, we propose MatchDance, a novel framework for music-to-dance generation that constructs a latent representation to enhance choreographic consistency. MatchDance employs a two-stage design: (1) a Kinematic-Dynamic-based Quantization Stage (KDQS), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) with kinematic-dynamic constraints and reconstructs them with high fidelity, and (2) a Hybrid Music-to-Dance Generation Stage(HMDGS), which uses a Mamba-Transformer hybrid architecture to map music into the latent representation, followed by the KDQS decoder to generate 3D dance motions. Additionally, a music-dance retrieval framework and comprehensive metrics are introduced for evaluation. Extensive experiments on the FineDance dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released upon acceptance.

PAMD: Plausibility-Aware Motion Diffusion Model for Long Dance Generation

Computational dance generation is crucial in many areas, such as art, human-computer interaction, virtual reality, and digital entertainment, particularly for generating coherent and expressive long dance sequences. Diffusion-based music-to-dance generation has made significant progress, yet existing methods still struggle to produce physically plausible motions. To address this, we propose Plausibility-Aware Motion Diffusion (PAMD), a framework for generating dances that are both musically aligned and physically realistic. The core of PAMD lies in the Plausible Motion Constraint (PMC), which leverages Neural Distance Fields (NDFs) to model the actual pose manifold and guide generated motions toward a physically valid pose manifold. To provide more effective guidance during generation, we incorporate Prior Motion Guidance (PMG), which uses standing poses as auxiliary conditions alongside music features. To further enhance realism for complex movements, we introduce the Motion Refinement with Foot-ground Contact (MRFC) module, which addresses foot-skating artifacts by bridging the gap between the optimization objective in linear joint position space and the data representation in nonlinear rotation space. Extensive experiments show that PAMD significantly improves musical alignment and enhances the physical plausibility of generated motions. This project page is available at: https://mucunzhuzhu.github.io/PAMD-page/.

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.

Not that Groove: Zero-Shot Symbolic Music Editing

Most work in AI music generation focused on audio, which has seen limited use in the music production industry due to its rigidity. To maximize flexibility while assuming only textual instructions from producers, we are among the first to tackle symbolic music editing. We circumvent the known challenge of lack of labeled data by proving that LLMs with zero-shot prompting can effectively edit drum grooves. The recipe of success is a creatively designed format that interfaces LLMs and music, while we facilitate evaluation by providing an evaluation dataset with annotated unit tests that highly aligns with musicians' judgment.

Level Generation with Quantum Reservoir Computing

Reservoir computing is a form of machine learning particularly suited for time series analysis, including forecasting predictions. We take an implementation of \emph{quantum} reservoir computing that was initially designed to generate variants of musical scores and adapt it to create levels of Super Mario Bros. Motivated by our analysis of these levels, we develop a new Roblox \textit{obby} where the courses can be generated in real time on superconducting qubit hardware, and investigate some of the constraints placed by such real-time generation.