LiveBand: Live Accompaniment Generation in the Audio Domain
2026-06-02 • Sound
SoundArtificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors introduce LiveBand, a system that creates live music accompaniments in real-time, using only past and current audio, without seeing the future sounds. They train a special transformer model to generate music parts step-by-step, based on what it hears so far and some randomness, making sure it doesn’t peek ahead. Their approach uses a technique that matches training and real-time use, avoiding common issues with previous methods. LiveBand performs better on several music quality measures and runs smoothly on regular computers.
causal transformeraudio autoencoderadversarial trainingsequence-level supervisionautoregressive generationcausal maskingteacher forcingexposure biasreal-time music generationbeat alignment
Authors
Marco Pasini, Javier Nistal, Mathias Rose Bjare, Stefan Lattner, George Fazekas
Abstract
We present LiveBand, a real-time system that generates high-fidelity music accompaniments to live audio input, respecting strict causal constraints. Our method trains a causal transformer generator in the continuous latent space of a pre-trained causal audio autoencoder, using adversarial sequence-level supervision from a discriminator. At each timestep, the generator receives only the causally available mix context and Gaussian noise, and predicts accompaniment latents without access to future mix frames or ground-truth target latents. Training is performed in a single parallel forward pass under causal masking, while streaming inference proceeds autoregressively with a rolling attention state. The model's training and inference computations are matched by design, eliminating teacher forcing and the associated exposure bias. On a multi-instrument music accompaniment benchmark, LiveBand improves over prior work on objective measures of audio quality, beat alignment, and mix adherence, while enabling real-time streaming generation without lookahead into the future on consumer hardware.