arXiv subjects

Taketo Akama

Publications and source records attributed to Taketo Akama.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Dance to Music Generation leveraging Pre-training with Unpaired data and Contrastive Alignment

Dance-to-music generation is a promising task for applications such as choreography support and automatic accompaniment, where temporal coordination between body movement and sound is essential. In particular, using human joint positions as the motion representation is attractive because they explicitly capture body dynamics while being lightweight, privacy-preserving, and easy to integrate with motion capture and pose-estimation pipelines. A central challenge in this setting, however, is the scarcity of high-quality paired dance-music data, since collecting accurately synchronized pairs is costly and often constrained by copyright and performance rights. This makes it difficult to train end-to-end models solely from paired data. To address this issue, we propose a dance-conditioned music generation framework that efficiently exploits both unpaired and paired data. Our method combines pretrained unimodal encoders for motion and music, beat-guided contrastive pretraining to align their feature spaces, and a ControlNet-style conditioning module on top of a pretrained text-to-audio diffusion model. Experiments on AIST++ demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve both dance-music alignment and audio quality, as confirmed by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared to a state-of-the-art method, our approach achieves superior dance alignment performance and competitive audio quality. Code is available at https://github.com/kmraven/AudioLDM-ControlNet .

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Expectation and Acoustic Neural Network Representations Enhance Music Identification from Brain Activity

During music listening, cortical activity encodes both acoustic and expectation-related information. Prior work has shown that ANN representations resemble cortical representations and can serve as supervisory signals for EEG recognition. Here we show that distinguishing acoustic and expectation-related ANN representations as teacher targets improves EEG-based music identification. Models pretrained to predict either representation outperform non-pretrained baselines, and combining them yields complementary gains that exceed strong seed ensembles formed by varying random initializations. These findings show that teacher representation type shapes downstream performance and that representation learning can be guided by neural encoding. This work points toward advances in predictive music cognition and neural decoding. Our expectation representation, computed directly from raw signals without manual labels, reflects predictive structure beyond onset or pitch, enabling investigation of multilayer predictive encoding across diverse stimuli. Its scalability to large, diverse datasets further suggests potential for developing general-purpose EEG models grounded in cortical encoding principles.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Interpretable and Perceptually-Aligned Music Similarity with Pretrained Embeddings

Perceptual similarity representations enable music retrieval systems to determine which songs sound most similar to listeners. State-of-the-art approaches based on task-specific training via self-supervised metric learning show promising alignment with human judgment, but are difficult to interpret or generalize due to limited dataset availability. We show that pretrained text-audio embeddings (CLAP and MuQ-MuLan) offer comparable perceptual alignment on similarity tasks without any additional fine-tuning. To surpass this baseline, we introduce a novel method to perceptually align pretrained embeddings with source separation and linear optimization on ABX preference data from listening tests. Our model provides interpretable and controllable instrument-wise weights, allowing music producers to retrieve stem-level loops and samples based on mixed reference songs.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

PF-D2M: A Pose-free Diffusion Model for Universal Dance-to-Music Generation

Dance-to-music generation aims to generate music that is aligned with dance movements. Existing approaches typically rely on body motion features extracted from a single human dancer and limited dance-to-music datasets, which restrict their performance and applicability to real-world scenarios involving multiple dancers and non-human dancers. In this paper, we propose PF-D2M, a universal diffusion-based dance-to-music generation model that incorporates visual features extracted from dance videos. PF-D2M is trained with a progressive training strategy that effectively addresses data scarcity and generalization challenges. Both objective and subjective evaluations show that PF-D2M achieves state-of-the-art performance in dance-music alignment and music quality.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Self-supervised restoration of singing voice degraded by pitch shifting using shallow diffusion

Pitch shifting has been an essential feature in singing voice production. However, conventional signal processing approaches exhibit well known trade offs such as formant shifts and robotic coloration that becomes more severe at larger transposition jumps. This paper targets high quality pitch shifting for singing by reframing it as a restoration problem: given an audio track that has been pitch shifted (and thus contaminated by artifacts), we recover a natural sounding performance while preserving its melody and timing. Specifically, we use a lightweight, mel space diffusion model driven by frame level acoustic features such as f0, volume, and content features. We construct training pairs in a self supervised manner by applying pitch shifts and reversing them to simulate realistic artifacts while retaining ground truth. On a curated singing set, the proposed approach substantially reduces pitch shift artifacts compared to representative classical baselines, as measured by both statistical metrics and pairwise acoustic measures. The results suggest that restoration based pitch shifting could be a viable approach towards artifact resistant transposition in vocal production workflows.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Towards Realistic Synthetic Data for Automatic Drum Transcription

Deep learning models define the state-of-the-art in Automatic Drum Transcription (ADT), yet their performance is contingent upon large-scale, paired audio-MIDI datasets, which are scarce. Existing workarounds that use synthetic data often introduce a significant domain gap, as they typically rely on low-fidelity SoundFont libraries that lack acoustic diversity. While high-quality one-shot samples offer a better alternative, they are not available in a standardized, large-scale format suitable for training. This paper introduces a new paradigm for ADT that circumvents the need for paired audio-MIDI training data. Our primary contribution is a semi-supervised method to automatically curate a large and diverse corpus of one-shot drum samples from unlabeled audio sources. We then use this corpus to synthesize a high-quality dataset from MIDI files alone, which we use to train a sequence-to-sequence transcription model. We evaluate our model on the ENST and MDB test sets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art results, significantly outperforming both fully supervised methods and previous synthetic-data approaches. The code for reproducing our experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/pier-maker92/ADT_STR

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

SSDLabeler: Realistic semi-synthetic data generation for multi-label artifact classification in EEG

EEG recordings are inherently contaminated by artifacts such as ocular, muscular, and environmental noise, which obscure neural activity and complicate preprocessing. Artifact classification offers advantages in stability and transparency, providing a viable alternative to ICA-based methods that enable flexible use alongside human inspections and across various applications. However, artifact classification is limited by its training data as it requires extensive manual labeling, which cannot fully cover the diversity of real-world EEG. Semi-synthetic data (SSD) methods have been proposed to address this limitation, but prior approaches typically injected single artifact types using ICA components or required separately recorded artifact signals, reducing both the realism of the generated data and the applicability of the method. To overcome these issues, we introduce SSDLabeler, a framework that generates realistic, annotated SSDs by decomposing real EEG with ICA, epoch-level artifact verification using RMS and PSD criteria, and reinjecting multiple artifact types into clean data. When applied to train a multi-label artifact classifier, it improved accuracy on raw EEG across diverse conditions compared to prior SSD and raw EEG training, establishing a scalable foundation for artifact handling that captures the co-occurrence and complexity of real EEG.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2025

Decoding Selective Auditory Attention to Musical Elements in Ecologically Valid Music Listening

Art has long played a profound role in shaping human emotion, cognition, and behavior. While visual arts such as painting and architecture have been studied through eye tracking, revealing distinct gaze patterns between experts and novices, analogous methods for auditory art forms remain underdeveloped. Music, despite being a pervasive component of modern life and culture, still lacks objective tools to quantify listeners' attention and perceptual focus during natural listening experiences. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to decode selective attention to musical elements using naturalistic, studio-produced songs and a lightweight consumer-grade EEG device with only four electrodes. By analyzing neural responses during real world like music listening, we test whether decoding is feasible under conditions that minimize participant burden and preserve the authenticity of the musical experience. Our contributions are fourfold: (i) decoding music attention in real studio-produced songs, (ii) demonstrating feasibility with a four-channel consumer EEG, (iii) providing insights for music attention decoding, and (iv) demonstrating improved model ability over prior work. Our findings suggest that musical attention can be decoded not only for novel songs but also across new subjects, showing performance improvements compared to existing approaches under our tested conditions. These findings show that consumer-grade devices can reliably capture signals, and that neural decoding in music could be feasible in real-world settings. This paves the way for applications in education, personalized music technologies, and therapeutic interventions.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Predicting Artificial Neural Network Representations to Learn Recognition Model for Music Identification from Brain Recordings

Recent studies have demonstrated that the representations of artificial neural networks (ANNs) can exhibit notable similarities to cortical representations when subjected to identical auditory sensory inputs. In these studies, the ability to predict cortical representations is probed by regressing from ANN representations to cortical representations. Building upon this concept, our approach reverses the direction of prediction: we utilize ANN representations as a supervisory signal to train recognition models using noisy brain recordings obtained through non-invasive measurements. Specifically, we focus on constructing a recognition model for music identification, where electroencephalography (EEG) brain recordings collected during music listening serve as input. By training an EEG recognition model to predict ANN representations-representations associated with music identification-we observed a substantial improvement in classification accuracy. This study introduces a novel approach to developing recognition models for brain recordings in response to external auditory stimuli. It holds promise for advancing brain-computer interfaces (BCI), neural decoding techniques, and our understanding of music cognition. Furthermore, it provides new insights into the relationship between auditory brain activity and ANN representations.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Music Foundation Model as Generic Booster for Music Downstream Tasks

We demonstrate the efficacy of using intermediate representations from a single foundation model to enhance various music downstream tasks. We introduce SoniDo, a music foundation model (MFM) designed to extract hierarchical features from target music samples. By leveraging hierarchical intermediate features, SoniDo constrains the information granularity, leading to improved performance across various downstream tasks including both understanding and generative tasks. We specifically evaluated this approach on representative tasks such as music tagging, music transcription, music source separation, and music mixing. Our results reveal that the features extracted from foundation models provide valuable enhancements in training downstream task models. This highlights the capability of using features extracted from music foundation models as a booster for downstream tasks. Our approach not only benefits existing task-specific models but also supports music downstream tasks constrained by data scarcity. This paves the way for more effective and accessible music processing solutions.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Annotation-Free MIDI-to-Audio Synthesis via Concatenative Synthesis and Generative Refinement

Recent MIDI-to-audio synthesis methods using deep neural networks have successfully generated high-quality, expressive instrumental tracks. However, these methods require MIDI annotations for supervised training, limiting the diversity of instrument timbres and expression styles in the output. We propose CoSaRef, a MIDI-to-audio synthesis method that does not require MIDI-audio paired datasets. CoSaRef first generates a synthetic audio track using concatenative synthesis based on MIDI input, then refines it with a diffusion-based deep generative model trained on datasets without MIDI annotations. This approach improves the diversity of timbres and expression styles. Additionally, it allows detailed control over timbres and expression through audio sample selection and extra MIDI design, similar to traditional functions in digital audio workstations. Experiments showed that CoSaRef could generate realistic tracks while preserving fine-grained timbre control via one-shot samples. Moreover, despite not being supervised on MIDI annotation, CoSaRef outperformed the state-of-the-art timbre-controllable method based on MIDI supervision in both objective and subjective evaluation.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

A Computational Analysis of Lyric Similarity Perception

In musical compositions that include vocals, lyrics significantly contribute to artistic expression. Consequently, previous studies have introduced the concept of a recommendation system that suggests lyrics similar to a user's favorites or personalized preferences, aiding in the discovery of lyrics among millions of tracks. However, many of these systems do not fully consider human perceptions of lyric similarity, primarily due to limited research in this area. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comparative analysis of computational methods for modeling lyric similarity with human perception. Results indicated that computational models based on similarities between embeddings from pre-trained BERT-based models, the audio from which the lyrics are derived, and phonetic components are indicative of perceptual lyric similarity. This finding underscores the importance of semantic, stylistic, and phonetic similarities in human perception about lyric similarity. We anticipate that our findings will enhance the development of similarity-based lyric recommendation systems by offering pseudo-labels for neural network development and introducing objective evaluation metrics.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Music Proofreading with RefinPaint: Where and How to Modify Compositions given Context

Autoregressive generative transformers are key in music generation, producing coherent compositions but facing challenges in human-machine collaboration. We propose RefinPaint, an iterative technique that improves the sampling process. It does this by identifying the weaker music elements using a feedback model, which then informs the choices for resampling by an inpainting model. This dual-focus methodology not only facilitates the machine's ability to improve its automatic inpainting generation through repeated cycles but also offers a valuable tool for humans seeking to refine their compositions with automatic proofreading. Experimental results suggest RefinPaint's effectiveness in inpainting and proofreading tasks, demonstrating its value for refining music created by both machines and humans. This approach not only facilitates creativity but also aids amateur composers in improving their work.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

A Preliminary Investigation on Flexible Singing Voice Synthesis Through Decomposed Framework with Inferrable Features

We investigate the feasibility of a singing voice synthesis (SVS) system by using a decomposed framework to improve flexibility in generating singing voices. Due to data-driven approaches, SVS performs a music score-to-waveform mapping; however, the direct mapping limits control, such as being able to only synthesize in the language or the singers present in the labeled singing datasets. As collecting large singing datasets labeled with music scores is an expensive task, we investigate an alternative approach by decomposing the SVS system and inferring different singing voice features. We decompose the SVS system into three-stage modules of linguistic, pitch contour, and synthesis, in which singing voice features such as linguistic content, F0, voiced/unvoiced, singer embeddings, and loudness are directly inferred from audio. Through this decomposed framework, we show that we can alleviate the labeled dataset requirements, adapt to different languages or singers, and inpaint the lyrical content of singing voices. Our investigations show that the framework has the potential to reach state-of-the-art in SVS, even though the model has additional functionality and improved flexibility. The comprehensive analysis of our investigated framework's current capabilities sheds light on the ways the research community can achieve a flexible and multifunctional SVS system.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Annotation-free Automatic Music Transcription with Scalable Synthetic Data and Adversarial Domain Confusion

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) is a vital technology in the field of music information processing. Despite recent enhancements in performance due to machine learning techniques, current methods typically attain high accuracy in domains where abundant annotated data is available. Addressing domains with low or no resources continues to be an unresolved challenge. To tackle this issue, we propose a transcription model that does not require any MIDI-audio paired data through the utilization of scalable synthetic audio for pre-training and adversarial domain confusion using unannotated real audio. In experiments, we evaluate methods under the real-world application scenario where training datasets do not include the MIDI annotation of audio in the target data domain. Our proposed method achieved competitive performance relative to established baseline methods, despite not utilizing any real datasets of paired MIDI-audio. Additionally, ablation studies have provided insights into the scalability of this approach and the forthcoming challenges in the field of AMT research.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Naturalistic Music Decoding from EEG Data via Latent Diffusion Models

In this article, we explore the potential of using latent diffusion models, a family of powerful generative models, for the task of reconstructing naturalistic music from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Unlike simpler music with limited timbres, such as MIDI-generated tunes or monophonic pieces, the focus here is on intricate music featuring a diverse array of instruments, voices, and effects, rich in harmonics and timbre. This study represents an initial foray into achieving general music reconstruction of high-quality using non-invasive EEG data, employing an end-to-end training approach directly on raw data without the need for manual pre-processing and channel selection. We train our models on the public NMED-T dataset and perform quantitative evaluation proposing neural embedding-based metrics. Our work contributes to the ongoing research in neural decoding and brain-computer interfaces, offering insights into the feasibility of using EEG data for complex auditory information reconstruction.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

HyperGANStrument: Instrument Sound Synthesis and Editing with Pitch-Invariant Hypernetworks

GANStrument, exploiting GANs with a pitch-invariant feature extractor and instance conditioning technique, has shown remarkable capabilities in synthesizing realistic instrument sounds. To further improve the reconstruction ability and pitch accuracy to enhance the editability of user-provided sound, we propose HyperGANStrument, which introduces a pitch-invariant hypernetwork to modulate the weights of a pre-trained GANStrument generator, given a one-shot sound as input. The hypernetwork modulation provides feedback for the generator in the reconstruction of the input sound. In addition, we take advantage of an adversarial fine-tuning scheme for the hypernetwork to improve the reconstruction fidelity and generation diversity of the generator. Experimental results show that the proposed model not only enhances the generation capability of GANStrument but also significantly improves the editability of synthesized sounds. Audio examples are available at the online demo page.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

Automatic Piano Transcription with Hierarchical Frequency-Time Transformer

Taking long-term spectral and temporal dependencies into account is essential for automatic piano transcription. This is especially helpful when determining the precise onset and offset for each note in the polyphonic piano content. In this case, we may rely on the capability of self-attention mechanism in Transformers to capture these long-term dependencies in the frequency and time axes. In this work, we propose hFT-Transformer, which is an automatic music transcription method that uses a two-level hierarchical frequency-time Transformer architecture. The first hierarchy includes a convolutional block in the time axis, a Transformer encoder in the frequency axis, and a Transformer decoder that converts the dimension in the frequency axis. The output is then fed into the second hierarchy which consists of another Transformer encoder in the time axis. We evaluated our method with the widely used MAPS and MAESTRO v3.0.0 datasets, and it demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on all the F1-scores of the metrics among Frame, Note, Note with Offset, and Note with Offset and Velocity estimations.

cs.SD↗