arXiv subjects

Ju-Chiang Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Ju-Chiang Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

MQAD: A Large-Scale Question Answering Dataset for Training Music Large Language Models

Question-answering (QA) is a natural approach for humans to understand a piece of music audio. However, for machines, accessing a large-scale dataset covering diverse aspects of music is crucial, yet challenging, due to the scarcity of publicly available music data of this type. This paper introduces MQAD, a music QA dataset built on the Million Song Dataset (MSD), encompassing a rich array of musical features, including beat, chord, key, structure, instrument, and genre -- across 270,000 tracks, featuring nearly 3 million diverse questions and captions. MQAD distinguishes itself by offering detailed time-varying musical information such as chords and sections, enabling exploration into the inherent structure of music within a song. To compile MQAD, our methodology leverages specialized Music Information Retrieval (MIR) models to extract higher-level musical features and Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate natural language QA pairs. Then, we leverage a multimodal LLM that integrates the LLaMA2 and Whisper architectures, along with novel subjective metrics to assess the performance of MQAD. In experiments, our model trained on MQAD demonstrates advancements over conventional music audio captioning approaches. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/oyzh888/MQAD.

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arXiv2025

Temporal Adaptation of Pre-trained Foundation Models for Music Structure Analysis

Audio-based music structure analysis (MSA) is an essential task in Music Information Retrieval that remains challenging due to the complexity and variability of musical form. Recent advances highlight the potential of fine-tuning pre-trained music foundation models for MSA tasks. However, these models are typically trained with high temporal feature resolution and short audio windows, which limits their efficiency and introduces bias when applied to long-form audio. This paper presents a temporal adaptation approach for fine-tuning music foundation models tailored to MSA. Our method enables efficient analysis of full-length songs in a single forward pass by incorporating two key strategies: (1) audio window extension and (2) low-resolution adaptation. Experiments on the Harmonix Set and RWC-Pop datasets show that our method significantly improves both boundary detection and structural function prediction, while maintaining comparable memory usage and inference speed.

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arXiv2025

Every Image Listens, Every Image Dances: Music-Driven Image Animation

Image animation has become a promising area in multimodal research, with a focus on generating videos from reference images. While prior work has largely emphasized generic video generation guided by text, music-driven dance video generation remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce MuseDance, an innovative end-to-end model that animates reference images using both music and text inputs. This dual input enables MuseDance to generate personalized videos that follow text descriptions and synchronize character movements with the music. Unlike existing approaches, MuseDance eliminates the need for complex motion guidance inputs, such as pose or depth sequences, making flexible and creative video generation accessible to users of all expertise levels. To advance research in this field, we present a new multimodal dataset comprising 2,904 dance videos with corresponding background music and text descriptions. Our approach leverages diffusion-based methods to achieve robust generalization, precise control, and temporal consistency, setting a new baseline for the music-driven image animation task.

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arXiv2024

Seed-Music: A Unified Framework for High Quality and Controlled Music Generation

We introduce Seed-Music, a suite of music generation systems capable of producing high-quality music with fine-grained style control. Our unified framework leverages both auto-regressive language modeling and diffusion approaches to support two key music creation workflows: controlled music generation and post-production editing. For controlled music generation, our system enables vocal music generation with performance controls from multi-modal inputs, including style descriptions, audio references, musical scores, and voice prompts. For post-production editing, it offers interactive tools for editing lyrics and vocal melodies directly in the generated audio. We encourage readers to listen to demo audio examples at https://team.doubao.com/seed-music "https://team.doubao.com/seed-music".

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arXiv2024

SymPAC: Scalable Symbolic Music Generation With Prompts And Constraints

Progress in the task of symbolic music generation may be lagging behind other tasks like audio and text generation, in part because of the scarcity of symbolic training data. In this paper, we leverage the greater scale of audio music data by applying pre-trained MIR models (for transcription, beat tracking, structure analysis, etc.) to extract symbolic events and encode them into token sequences. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of training symbolic generation models solely from auto-transcribed audio data. Furthermore, to enhance the controllability of the trained model, we introduce SymPAC (Symbolic Music Language Model with Prompting And Constrained Generation), which is distinguished by using (a) prompt bars in encoding and (b) a technique called Constrained Generation via Finite State Machines (FSMs) during inference time. We show the flexibility and controllability of this approach, which may be critical in making music AI useful to creators and users.

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arXiv2024

Mel-RoFormer for Vocal Separation and Vocal Melody Transcription

Developing a versatile deep neural network to model music audio is crucial in MIR. This task is challenging due to the intricate spectral variations inherent in music signals, which convey melody, harmonics, and timbres of diverse instruments. In this paper, we introduce Mel-RoFormer, a spectrogram-based model featuring two key designs: a novel Mel-band Projection module at the front-end to enhance the model's capability to capture informative features across multiple frequency bands, and interleaved RoPE Transformers to explicitly model the frequency and time dimensions as two separate sequences. We apply Mel-RoFormer to tackle two essential MIR tasks: vocal separation and vocal melody transcription, aimed at isolating singing voices from audio mixtures and transcribing their lead melodies, respectively. Despite their shared focus on singing signals, these tasks possess distinct optimization objectives. Instead of training a unified model, we adopt a two-step approach. Initially, we train a vocal separation model, which subsequently serves as a foundation model for fine-tuning for vocal melody transcription. Through extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets, we showcase that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance in both vocal separation and melody transcription tasks, underscoring the efficacy and versatility of Mel-RoFormer in modeling complex music audio signals.

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arXiv2024

Music Era Recognition Using Supervised Contrastive Learning and Artist Information

Does popular music from the 60s sound different than that of the 90s? Prior study has shown that there would exist some variations of patterns and regularities related to instrumentation changes and growing loudness across multi-decadal trends. This indicates that perceiving the era of a song from musical features such as audio and artist information is possible. Music era information can be an important feature for playlist generation and recommendation. However, the release year of a song can be inaccessible in many circumstances. This paper addresses a novel task of music era recognition. We formulate the task as a music classification problem and propose solutions based on supervised contrastive learning. An audio-based model is developed to predict the era from audio. For the case where the artist information is available, we extend the audio-based model to take multimodal inputs and develop a framework, called MultiModal Contrastive (MMC) learning, to enhance the training. Experimental result on Million Song Dataset demonstrates that the audio-based model achieves 54% in accuracy with a tolerance of 3-years range; incorporating the artist information with the MMC framework for training leads to 9% improvement further.

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arXiv2024

StemGen: A music generation model that listens

End-to-end generation of musical audio using deep learning techniques has seen an explosion of activity recently. However, most models concentrate on generating fully mixed music in response to abstract conditioning information. In this work, we present an alternative paradigm for producing music generation models that can listen and respond to musical context. We describe how such a model can be constructed using a non-autoregressive, transformer-based model architecture and present a number of novel architectural and sampling improvements. We train the described architecture on both an open-source and a proprietary dataset. We evaluate the produced models using standard quality metrics and a new approach based on music information retrieval descriptors. The resulting model reaches the audio quality of state-of-the-art text-conditioned models, as well as exhibiting strong musical coherence with its context.

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arXiv2023

Mel-Band RoFormer for Music Source Separation

Recently, multi-band spectrogram-based approaches such as Band-Split RNN (BSRNN) have demonstrated promising results for music source separation. In our recent work, we introduce the BS-RoFormer model which inherits the idea of band-split scheme in BSRNN at the front-end, and then uses the hierarchical Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) to model the inner-band and inter-band sequences for multi-band mask estimation. This model has achieved state-of-the-art performance, but the band-split scheme is defined empirically, without analytic supports from the literature. In this paper, we propose Mel-RoFormer, which adopts the Mel-band scheme that maps the frequency bins into overlapped subbands according to the mel scale. In contract, the band-split mapping in BSRNN and BS-RoFormer is non-overlapping and designed based on heuristics. Using the MUSDB18HQ dataset for experiments, we demonstrate that Mel-RoFormer outperforms BS-RoFormer in the separation tasks of vocals, drums, and other stems.

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arXiv2023

Scaling Up Music Information Retrieval Training with Semi-Supervised Learning

In the era of data-driven Music Information Retrieval (MIR), the scarcity of labeled data has been one of the major concerns to the success of an MIR task. In this work, we leverage the semi-supervised teacher-student training approach to improve MIR tasks. For training, we scale up the unlabeled music data to 240k hours, which is much larger than any public MIR datasets. We iteratively create and refine the pseudo-labels in the noisy teacher-student training process. Knowledge expansion is also explored to iteratively scale up the model sizes from as small as less than 3M to almost 100M parameters. We study the performance correlation between data size and model size in the experiments. By scaling up both model size and training data, our models achieve state-of-the-art results on several MIR tasks compared to models that are either trained in a supervised manner or based on a self-supervised pretrained model. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the effects of scaling up both model and training data for a variety of MIR tasks.

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arXiv2023

Music Source Separation with Band-Split RoPE Transformer

Music source separation (MSS) aims to separate a music recording into multiple musically distinct stems, such as vocals, bass, drums, and more. Recently, deep learning approaches such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used, but the improvement is still limited. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-domain approach based on a Band-Split RoPE Transformer (called BS-RoFormer). BS-RoFormer relies on a band-split module to project the input complex spectrogram into subband-level representations, and then arranges a stack of hierarchical Transformers to model the inner-band as well as inter-band sequences for multi-band mask estimation. To facilitate training the model for MSS, we propose to use the Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). The BS-RoFormer system trained on MUSDB18HQ and 500 extra songs ranked the first place in the MSS track of Sound Demixing Challenge (SDX23). Benchmarking a smaller version of BS-RoFormer on MUSDB18HQ, we achieve state-of-the-art result without extra training data, with 9.80 dB of average SDR.

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arXiv2023

Multitrack Music Transcription with a Time-Frequency Perceiver

Multitrack music transcription aims to transcribe a music audio input into the musical notes of multiple instruments simultaneously. It is a very challenging task that typically requires a more complex model to achieve satisfactory result. In addition, prior works mostly focus on transcriptions of regular instruments, however, neglecting vocals, which are usually the most important signal source if present in a piece of music. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture, Perceiver TF, to model the time-frequency representation of audio input for multitrack transcription. Perceiver TF augments the Perceiver architecture by introducing a hierarchical expansion with an additional Transformer layer to model temporal coherence. Accordingly, our model inherits the benefits of Perceiver that posses better scalability, allowing it to well handle transcriptions of many instruments in a single model. In experiments, we train a Perceiver TF to model 12 instrument classes as well as vocal in a multi-task learning manner. Our result demonstrates that the proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts (e.g., MT3 and SpecTNT) on various public datasets.

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arXiv2023

SingNet: A Real-time Singing Voice Beat and Downbeat Tracking System

Singing voice beat and downbeat tracking posses several applications in automatic music production, analysis and manipulation. Among them, some require real-time processing, such as live performance processing and auto-accompaniment for singing inputs. This task is challenging owing to the non-trivial rhythmic and harmonic patterns in singing signals. For real-time processing, it introduces further constraints such as inaccessibility to future data and the impossibility to correct the previous results that are inconsistent with the latter ones. In this paper, we introduce the first system that tracks the beats and downbeats of singing voices in real-time. Specifically, we propose a novel dynamic particle filtering approach that incorporates offline historical data to correct the online inference by using a variable number of particles. We evaluate the performance on two datasets: GTZAN with the separated vocal tracks, and an in-house dataset with the original vocal stems. Experimental result demonstrates that our proposed approach outperforms the baseline by 3-5%.

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arXiv2023

Jointist: Simultaneous Improvement of Multi-instrument Transcription and Music Source Separation via Joint Training

In this paper, we introduce Jointist, an instrument-aware multi-instrument framework that is capable of transcribing, recognizing, and separating multiple musical instruments from an audio clip. Jointist consists of an instrument recognition module that conditions the other two modules: a transcription module that outputs instrument-specific piano rolls, and a source separation module that utilizes instrument information and transcription results. The joint training of the transcription and source separation modules serves to improve the performance of both tasks. The instrument module is optional and can be directly controlled by human users. This makes Jointist a flexible user-controllable framework. Our challenging problem formulation makes the model highly useful in the real world given that modern popular music typically consists of multiple instruments. Its novelty, however, necessitates a new perspective on how to evaluate such a model. In our experiments, we assess the proposed model from various aspects, providing a new evaluation perspective for multi-instrument transcription. Our subjective listening study shows that Jointist achieves state-of-the-art performance on popular music, outperforming existing multi-instrument transcription models such as MT3. We conducted experiments on several downstream tasks and found that the proposed method improved transcription by more than 1 percentage points (ppt.), source separation by 5 SDR, downbeat detection by 1.8 ppt., chord recognition by 1.4 ppt., and key estimation by 1.4 ppt., when utilizing transcription results obtained from Jointist. Demo available at \url{https://jointist.github.io/Demo}.

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arXiv2023

Modeling the Rhythm from Lyrics for Melody Generation of Pop Song

Creating a pop song melody according to pre-written lyrics is a typical practice for composers. A computational model of how lyrics are set as melodies is important for automatic composition systems, but an end-to-end lyric-to-melody model would require enormous amounts of paired training data. To mitigate the data constraints, we adopt a two-stage approach, dividing the task into lyric-to-rhythm and rhythm-to-melody modules. However, the lyric-to-rhythm task is still challenging due to its multimodality. In this paper, we propose a novel lyric-to-rhythm framework that includes part-of-speech tags to achieve better text setting, and a Transformer architecture designed to model long-term syllable-to-note associations. For the rhythm-to-melody task, we adapt a proven chord-conditioned melody Transformer, which has achieved state-of-the-art results. Experiments for Chinese lyric-to-melody generation show that the proposed framework is able to model key characteristics of rhythm and pitch distributions in the dataset, and in a subjective evaluation, the melodies generated by our system were rated as similar to or better than those of a state-of-the-art alternative.

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arXiv2022

MuSFA: Improving Music Structural Function Analysis with Partially Labeled Data

Music structure analysis (MSA) systems aim to segment a song recording into non-overlapping sections with useful labels. Previous MSA systems typically predict abstract labels in a post-processing step and require the full context of the song. By contrast, we recently proposed a supervised framework, called "Music Structural Function Analysis" (MuSFA), that models and predicts meaningful labels like 'verse' and 'chorus' directly from audio, without requiring the full context of a song. However, the performance of this system depends on the amount and quality of training data. In this paper, we propose to repurpose a public dataset, HookTheory Lead Sheet Dataset (HLSD), to improve the performance. HLSD contains over 18K excerpts of music sections originally collected for studying automatic melody harmonization. We treat each excerpt as a partially labeled song and provide a label mapping, so that HLSD can be used together with other public datasets, such as SALAMI, RWC, and Isophonics. In cross-dataset evaluations, we find that including HLSD in training can improve state-of-the-art boundary detection and section labeling scores by ~3% and ~1% respectively.

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arXiv2022

Jointist: Joint Learning for Multi-instrument Transcription and Its Applications

In this paper, we introduce Jointist, an instrument-aware multi-instrument framework that is capable of transcribing, recognizing, and separating multiple musical instruments from an audio clip. Jointist consists of the instrument recognition module that conditions the other modules: the transcription module that outputs instrument-specific piano rolls, and the source separation module that utilizes instrument information and transcription results. The instrument conditioning is designed for an explicit multi-instrument functionality while the connection between the transcription and source separation modules is for better transcription performance. Our challenging problem formulation makes the model highly useful in the real world given that modern popular music typically consists of multiple instruments. However, its novelty necessitates a new perspective on how to evaluate such a model. During the experiment, we assess the model from various aspects, providing a new evaluation perspective for multi-instrument transcription. We also argue that transcription models can be utilized as a preprocessing module for other music analysis tasks. In the experiment on several downstream tasks, the symbolic representation provided by our transcription model turned out to be helpful to spectrograms in solving downbeat detection, chord recognition, and key estimation.

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arXiv2022

To catch a chorus, verse, intro, or anything else: Analyzing a song with structural functions

Conventional music structure analysis algorithms aim to divide a song into segments and to group them with abstract labels (e.g., 'A', 'B', and 'C'). However, explicitly identifying the function of each segment (e.g., 'verse' or 'chorus') is rarely attempted, but has many applications. We introduce a multi-task deep learning framework to model these structural semantic labels directly from audio by estimating "verseness," "chorusness," and so forth, as a function of time. We propose a 7-class taxonomy (i.e., intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro, instrumental, and silence) and provide rules to consolidate annotations from four disparate datasets. We also propose to use a spectral-temporal Transformer-based model, called SpecTNT, which can be trained with an additional connectionist temporal localization (CTL) loss. In cross-dataset evaluations using four public datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the SpecTNT model and CTL loss, and obtain strong results overall: the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art chorus-detection and boundary-detection methods at detecting choruses and boundaries, respectively.

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