Papers for
music streaming platforms
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Machine learning improves automatic piano music transcription accuracy
A learning-based method of automatic music transcription
Abstract: Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) seeks to convert acoustic music recordings into symbolic musical notation, a process that remains remarkably difficult for polyphonic piano due to concurrent polyphony, harmonic partial interference, expressive timing, and severe pitch activation sparsity. In this paper, we formulate polyphonic piano transcription as a frame-level multi-label classification problem across the standard 88 piano pitches (MIDI notes 21 to 108). Raw audio waveforms are processed using the Constant-Q Transform (CQT) to construct a geometrically spaced log-frequency time-frequency representation that aligns with the chromatic musical scale across seven octaves (252 frequency bins per frame). We systematically investigate recurrent sequence models, contrasting unidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) backbones, and propose two architectural adaptations tailored to recurrent temporal representations: a modified additive attention module and a modified multihead attention mechanism equipped with hyperbolic tangent activation and head-wise summation. Furthermore, to mitigate the severe class imbalance between inactive and active notes (approximately 41:1), we evaluate Weighted Binary Cross-Entropy (WBCE) alongside standard Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE). Rigorous empirical evaluations on the MAPS and MAESTRO datasets demonstrate steady, compounding gains from bidirectionality and attention mechanisms. Our proposed Multihead Attention-BiLSTM architecture attains an F1-score of 88.20%, an accuracy of 78.90%, a precision of 0.89, and a recall of 0.86, substantially outperforming the baseline unidirectional LSTM (F1-score of 71.20%) while maintaining a compact parameter budget of 4.43M. Qualitative piano-roll visualizations confirm that our model generates faithful transcriptions even in complex harmonic passages.
AI DJ plans and checks pop music mixes for better transitions
DJustify: Reason-and-Verify DJ Planning for Pop Transitions and Story-Driven Sets
Abstract: Automatic DJ systems mostly target electronic dance music, whose regular structure makes rule-based mixing relatively easier. Vocal-rich popular music is harder: which track to play next, where to cue it, and which transition to use are tied together, so fixed rules handle them poorly. We present DJustify, a pop AI-DJ that puts an LLM in a reason--propose--verify--repair loop and lets it choose the next track, cue points, and mixing technique together. The LLM samples several transition plans; an external acoustic checker then scores the rendered audio and triggers repair when a check fails. Sampling keeps several candidate transitions per track pair instead of one fixed mix. In blind listening tests our transitions beat Mosaikbox, a reimplemented crossfade, and a cue baseline that reuses the crossfade's cues; that last comparison shows most of the margin comes from cue placement. The same planner also picks and orders a set along an emotion arc: this improves story coherence over a no-story ablation, and within a set story and transition ratings show no measurable gap from a human DJ. The checker mainly adds reliability, not higher average quality: it repairs rare but audible errors such as cut vocals, while the planner stays non-deterministic.
AI detection benchmark reveals music artifact patterns and limits
MUSEBENCH: A Benchmark for AI-Generated Music Detection and Artifact Analysis
Abstract: Advances in generative AI have made it possible to produce music that is nearly indistinguishable from human compositions, raising the question of whether such works can be reliably distinguished from human compositions. We present MUSEBENCH, a large-scale benchmark for AI-generated music detection and artifact analysis, comprising over 361K tracks. The dataset includes human compositions, stylistically matched music generated by ten state-of-the-art open-source and commercial models, such as Suno and Udio, as well as human-AI co-creations and variants processed with adversarial perturbations, compression, and acoustic post-processing. Using MUSEBENCH, we benchmark 11 automated detectors and evaluate their accuracy, generalization, and robustness, under default, out-of-domain, and transformed-variant experiment settings. We further conduct a comprehensive artifact analysis through acoustic feature inspection, identifying recurring signatures such as non-idiomatic harmonic progressions, upsampling induced spectral periodicities, and violations of physical performance constraints. Our findings reveal key strengths and vulnerabilities of existing detectors and provide practical insights for building more reliable AI music detection systems.
Music generation personalizes albums using user preference profiles
PAG-Agent: Zero-Shot Personalized Music Album Generation via Aesthetic Profile Distillation
Abstract: Large Music Models (LMMs) can synthesize high-fidelity audio and support increasingly flexible prompt control, yet modeling the subjective preferences of an individual listener remains underexplored. We present PAG-Agent, a zero-shot multimodal framework that uses an explicit Personal Aesthetic Profile to bridge user preference inference and music generation control. A multimodal LLM distills favorite-song audio and contextual user information into this structured representation, which a planning LLM translates into generation instructions for existing music synthesizers. We further introduce PA-Eval, which evaluates personalization through the Aesthetic Consistency Score (ACS) for target-user alignment and the Aesthetic Specificity Index (ASI) for cross-user specificity. Experiments with Personal-100 on multiple MLLM and music-generation backbones show consistent improvements over generic and direct conditioning. A 50-participant follow-up study further shows a correlation $r=0.64$ between ACS and subjective preference.
Large audio models improve music reasoning across song stems and sections
STEMMA: Song-to-Stem Multi-Audio Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models
Abstract: Music understanding often requires comparing excerpts and reasoning about relationships among songs, sections, and stems. However, existing large audio-language models (LALMs) and music question-answering datasets typically operate on single recordings or compare independently sampled tracks with no known production relationship. We introduce STEMMA, a multi-audio music question-answering framework built around production provenance: whether excerpts originate from the same track or section, and which stems belong to which mixtures. Because such relations are sparse under conventional audio-first sampling, STEMMA adopts a relation-first construction strategy: it first specifies a target relation and then queries the catalog for excerpts that satisfy it and hard negatives that do not. Labels are determined directly from catalog provenance rather than generated by a language model from metadata. We build STEMMA-Bench for evaluation and a track-disjoint training set, STEMMA-Instruct. Fine-tuning two LALMs on STEMMA-Instruct improves multi-audio reasoning, with the largest gains on structural relations directly determined by the catalog, while preserving single-audio music understanding.
Orchestral historical music restoration improves with latent space models
End-to-End Historical Music Restoration in Latent Space
Abstract: Historical music restoration (HMR) has almost exclusively focused on constrained problems such as Super-Resolution or the restoration of solo pieces, under-exploring the general task of restoring orchestral historical music, which has multiple instruments. This under-exploration is largely because the HMR domain, early-20th-century recordings, has no pre-degradation ground-truth pairs, making the restoration task unsupervised and more challenging. This paper presents a supervised end-to-end orchestral HMR benchmark by exploring both the synthetic degradation functions and the end-to-end generative deep-learning restoration methods. We simulate the historical recording degradation chain more faithfully than prior work, which makes orchestral restoration into a tractable supervised problem. A latent flow-matching model trained on the resulting synthetic pairs outperforms existing HMR baselines on intrusive, non-intrusive, and subjective evaluations. We also curate and release a 9.3-hour license-free, unpaired, historical classical-music test set, along with code and audio demos.
Dancer pose improves tagging of Greek traditional music alongside audio
Pose-Aware Multimodal Automatic Tagging for Greek Traditional Music
Abstract: Automatic tagging is a core task in Music Information Retrieval (MIR), yet most tagging systems exploit only audio. Live music performance is inherently multimodal, as semantic labels such as instruments, regional styles, and dance forms are encoded simultaneously across acoustic, visual, and embodied performance cues. This is especially true of culturally specific repertoires such as Greek traditional music, which remain underrepresented in MIR benchmarks. In this paper, we investigate whether the use of dancer pose provides complementary information for automatic tagging in Greek traditional music beyond audio. Using the Lyra dataset, we extend prior audio-only work by extracting aligned video features and pose-derived skeleton streams, enabling an experimental setting for multimodal auto-tagging. We further introduce an automated pipeline for extracting primary-dancer skeleton sequences from in-the-wild dance footage, combining dance-scene detection, multi-person tracking, dancer selection, pose estimation, and quality filtering. We compare unimodal, all bimodal combinations, and trimodal systems using multiple fusion strategies. Audio remains the strongest single modality (AST: macro ROC-AUC 0.821), while skeletons, though weak in isolation, enhance performance through multimodal fusion. The best trimodal system improves macro ROC-AUC by about 4 percentage points over the strongest audio baseline.
Music sample identification improves with real training pairs and new model
Training Music Sample Identification Models on Real Sample Pairs
Abstract: Sample identification (SI) is the task of matching pairs of tracks, where one track is created by musically transforming an element of the other. In the absence of sample annotations at scale, the dominant training paradigm has depended on artificially creating sample pairs. Although a recently released dataset provides annotations of real sample pairs at scale, an effective training recipe is missing. In this work, we present SI Embeddings (SIE), an SI model that achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks, including a large-scale test set. We show that the previous state of the art trained on artificial pairs generalizes only partially to real pairs, and that its training data limits its performance. We also show that real pairs do not fully account for SIE's performance: its architecture and training recipe contribute substantially. We provide the first fully supervised training recipe for real-world SI, establishing a strong foundation for future research in the field.