SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2603.09332

TimberAgent: Gram-Guided Retrieval for Executable Music Effect Control

Abstract

Digital audio workstations expose rich effect chains, yet a semantic gap remains between perceptual user intent and low-level signal-processing parameters. We study retrieval-grounded audio effect control, where the output is an editable plugin configuration rather than a finalized waveform. Our focus is Texture Resonance Retrieval (TRR), an audio representation built from Gram matrices of projected mid-level Wav2Vec2 activations. This design preserves texture-relevant co-activation structure. We evaluate TRR on a guitar-effects benchmark with 1,063 candidate presets and 204 queries. The evaluation follows Protocol-A, a cross-validation scheme that prevents train-test leakage. We compare TRR against CLAP and internal retrieval baselines (Wav2Vec-RAG, Text-RAG, FeatureNN-RAG), using min-max normalized metrics grounded in physical DSP parameter ranges. Ablation studies validate TRR's core design choices: projection dimensionality, layer selection, and projection type. A near-duplicate sensitivity analysis confirms that results are robust to trivial knowledge-base matches. TRR achieves the lowest normalized parameter error among evaluated methods. A multiple-stimulus listening study with 26 participants provides complementary perceptual evidence. We interpret these results as benchmark evidence that texture-aware retrieval is useful for editable audio effect control, while broader personalization and real-audio robustness claims remain outside the verified evidence presented here.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Shihao He, Yihan Xia, Fang Liu, Taotao Wang, Shengli Zhang. 2026-03-10. TimberAgent: Gram-Guided Retrieval for Executable Music Effect Control. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09332

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 Technical Report

Recently, large language model (LLM) based ASR models have achieved significant progress, yet they generally lack support for multi-speaker scenarios, where the cocktail party problem remains a critical bottleneck for further advancing ASR. Existing TS-ASR methods, including end-to-end architectures with speaker embeddings and latest LLM-based explorations suffer from degraded single-speaker performance and the inability to reject when the target speaker is absent. In this paper, we propose Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1, an LLM-based end-to-end TS-ASR architecture. By utilizing reference speech as voiceprint prompts, it directly transcribes the target speaker's speech without requiring speech separation. Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 maintains competitive performance in single-speaker scenarios, comparable to mainstream ASR models. It also features a negative sample rejection capability, outputting empty text when the target speaker is absent from the mixed speech. Additionally, Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 supports a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning mode to provide explicit reasoning steps. Extensive experiments on various synthetic and real-world multispeaker benchmarks demonstrate that Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the cocktail party problem through a unified architecture that balances multispeaker and single-speaker recognition accuracy, along with rejection capability.

cs.SD

EConv-TasNet: Efficient Conv-TasNet for Effective Speech Separation

Conv-TasNet has served as a strong baseline for time-domain speech separation, and many studies have extended it with advanced architectures such as dual-path networks, U-Nets, and attention mechanisms. However, these methods often introduce high computational cost and complexity, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. To address this issue, we propose eConv-TasNet, an efficient variant of Conv-TasNet that improves both effectiveness and efficiency without relying on resource-intensive modules. The proposed model consists of a group-wise early-splitting (GES) module and a multi-group feature aggregation (MGFA) module. GES generates discriminative speaker embeddings at intermediate stages, while MGFA progressively aggregates these group-level representations for refined mask estimation. Experimental results show that eConv-TasNet reduces model size by 22.4%, accelerates inference by 18.9%, and improves SI-SNRi by 14.0%-28.0% across three public benchmarks. Moreover, it achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods while requiring significantly fewer parameters and lower inference cost. These results demonstrate a favorable efficiency-effectiveness trade-off for edge deployment.

cs.SD