MSVAE: Rethinking Musical Semantics in Continuous Latent Spaces

Abstract

Continuous latent representations underlie recent diffusion-based lyrics-to-song and text-to-music systems, yet aligning lyric conditions with these latents remains difficult: existing systems resort to generator-side machinery such as sentence-level timestamps, auxiliary alignment objectives, or semi-autoregressive decoding, while the latents they predict are still produced by autoencoders trained purely for reconstruction. We address this difficulty from the representation side. We propose MSVAE (Music Semantic Variational Autoencoder), which structures its continuous latent around two complementary semantic streams: work-level compositional content and lyric-level linguistic-vocal content. Partitioned dual-stream alignment makes both streams explicit by aligning disjoint latent subspaces with frozen lead-sheet and ASR references, while a semantic-first gated residual posterior derives its base from a frozen music-SSL encoder and admits acoustic information only through gated, bounded corrections. MSVAE achieves competitive stereo reconstruction and stronger MARBLE probing than continuous-autoencoder baselines, and improves downstream lyrics-to-song and text-to-music generation. Notably, with only an untimed phoneme prefix and no lyric timing, MSVAE yields the lowest phoneme error rate, whereas all baseline representations require sentence-level alignment to produce intelligible vocals.