How to describe the shape of a melodic phrase? Scholars have often relied on typologies with a small set of contour types. We question their adequacy: we find no evidence that phrase contours cluster into discrete types, neither in German or Chinese folksongs, nor in Gregorian chant. The test for clustering we propose applies the dist-dip test of multimodality after a UMAP dimensionality reduction. The test correctly identifies clustering in a synthetic dataset, but not in actual phrase contours. These results raise problems for discrete typologies. In particular, type frequencies may be unreliable, as we see with Huron's typology. We also show how a recent finding of four contour shapes may be an artefact of the analysis. Our findings suggest that melodic contour is best seen as a continuous phenomenon.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13119
Recent advances in Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs) have made significant progress, greatly enhancing multimodal interaction this http URL, their application in low-resource and dialect-diverse environments still faces challenges. The severe scarcity of Tibetan data, coupled with the phonetic differences among its major dialects (Ã-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham), is a prime example of this challenge. This paper proposes Ti-Audio, the first multi-dialectal end-to-end Speech-LLM for Tibetan. To efficiently align speech and text, we introduce a Dynamic Q-Former Adapter that extracts essential acoustic features from variable-length speech, ensuring stable cross-modal alignment even with limited data. At the data level, we leverage mutual assistance among related dialects to alleviate data scarcity and employ a temperature-based sampling strategy to maximize this synergy. Experimental results demonstrate that Ti-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance on Tibetan benchmarks for automatic speech recognition and speech translation. Our work validates the effectiveness of cross-dialectal cooperation and provides a scalable paradigm for the development of Speech-LLM in low-resource scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11110
Vocal-to-accompaniment (V2A) generation, which aims to transform a raw vocal recording into a fully arranged accompaniment, inherently requires jointly addressing an accompaniment trilemma: preserving acoustic authenticity, maintaining global coherence with the vocal track, and producing dynamic orchestration across a full song. Existing open-source approaches typically make compromises among these goals. Continuous-latent generation models can capture long musical spans but often struggle to preserve fine-grained acoustic detail. In contrast, discrete autoregressive models retain local fidelity but suffer from unidirectional generation and error accumulation in extended contexts. We present LaDA-Band, an end-to-end framework that introduces Discrete Masked Diffusion to the V2A task. Our approach formulates V2A generation as Discrete Masked Diffusion, i.e., a global, non-autoregressive denoising formulation that combines the representational advantages of discrete audio codec tokens with full-sequence bidirectional context modeling. This design improves long-range structural consistency and temporal synchronization while preserving crisp acoustic details. Built on this formulation, LaDA-Band further introduces a dual-track prefix-conditioning architecture, an auxiliary replaced-token detection objective for weakly anchored accompaniment regions, and a two-stage progressive curriculum to scale Discrete Masked Diffusion to full-song vocal-to-accompaniment generation. Extensive experiments on both academic and real-world benchmarks show that LaDA-Band consistently improves acoustic authenticity, global coherence, and dynamic orchestration over existing baselines, while maintaining strong performance even without auxiliary reference audio. Codes and audio samples are available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11052
Traditional Active Noise Control (ANC) systems are mostly based on FxLMS algorithms, but such algorithms rely on linear assumptions and are often limited in handling broadband non-stationary noise or nonlinear acoustic paths. Not only that, the traditional method is used to eliminating all signals together, and noise reduction often accidentally damages the voice signal and affects normal communication. To tackle these issues, this study proposes a speech preserving deep learning ANC system, which aims to achieve stable noise reduction while effectively retaining speech in a complex acoustic environment. This study builds an end-to-end control architecture, the core of which adopts a Convolutional Recurrent Network (CRN). The structure uses the long short-term memory (LSTM) network to capture the time-related characteristics of acoustic signals. Combined with complex spectrum mapping (CSM) technology, the nonlinear distortion problem is effectively solved. In order to retain useful voice while removing noise, this study also designs a special voice retention loss function. This design guidance model selectively retains the target voice while suppressing environmental noise by identifying the characteristics of the spectrum structure. In addition, in order to verify whether the system is effective in real scenes, we use the Image Source Method (ISM) to build a high-fidelity acoustic simulation environment, which also simulates the real reverberation effect. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Deep ANC system achieves significantly better noise reduction than the traditional FxLMS algorithm, especially for non-stationary noises like crowd babble. Meanwhile, PESQ and STOI based evaluations confirm that the system preserves both the naturalness and intelligibility of the target speech.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10979
Collecting large, aligned cross-modal datasets for music-flavor research is difficult because perceptual experiments are costly and small by design. We address this bottleneck through two complementary experiments. The first tests whether audio-flavor correlations, feature-importance rankings, and latent-factor structure transfer from an experimental soundtracks collection (257~tracks with human annotations) to a large FMA-derived corpus ($\sim$49,300 segments with synthetic labels). The second validates computational flavor targets -- derived from food chemistry via a reproducible pipeline -- against human perception in an online listener study (49~participants, 20~tracks). Results from both experiments converge: the quantitative transfer analysis confirms that cross-modal structure is preserved across supervision regimes, and the perceptual evaluation shows significant alignment between computational targets and listener ratings (permutation $p<0.0001$, Mantel $r=0.45$, Procrustes $m^2=0.51$). Together, these findings support the conclusion that sonic seasoning effects are present in synthetic FMA annotations. We release datasets and companion code to support reproducible cross-modal AI research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10632
Audio-native large language models (audio-LLMs) commonly use Whisper as their audio encoder. However, Whisper was trained exclusively on speech data, producing weak representations for music and environmental sound. This forces downstream audio-LLMs to compensate through extensive training on large-scale non-speech data. We present Whisper-AuT, a domain-adapted audio encoder obtained by fine-tuning Whisper-large-v3 on a curated mixture of speech (80%), environmental sound (10%), and music (10%) totaling approximately 20M samples. The full encoder-decoder is trained end-to-end with a seq2seq captioning objective; the decoder is then discarded and only the encoder is retained. Linear probe evaluations show that Whisper-AuT achieves +23.0% on ESC-50 (environmental sound), +5.0% on GTZAN (music genre), and +0.7% on Speech Commands (keyword spotting) compared to the original Whisperlarge-v3 encoder. Whisper-AuT is designed as a drop-in replacement for Whisper in audio-LLM architectures, with the goal of reducing downstream training cost by providing stronger initial audio representations for non-speech domains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10438
Deep learning models have improved sign language-to-text translation and made it easier for non-signers to understand signed messages. When the goal is spoken communication, a naive approach is to convert signed messages into text and then synthesize speech via Text-to-Speech (TTS). However, this two-stage pipeline inevitably treat text as a bottleneck representation, causing the loss of rich non-verbal information originally conveyed in the signing. To address this limitation, we propose a novel task, \emph{Sign-to-Speech Prosody Transfer}, which aims to capture the global prosodic nuances expressed in sign language and directly integrate them into synthesized speech. A major challenge is that aligning sign and speech requires expert knowledge, making annotation extremely costly and preventing the construction of large parallel corpora. To overcome this, we introduce \emph{SignRecGAN}, a scalable training framework that leverages unimodal datasets without cross-modal annotations through adversarial learning and reconstruction losses. Furthermore, we propose \emph{S2PFormer}, a new model architecture that preserves the expressive power of existing TTS models while enabling the injection of sign-derived prosody into the synthesized speech. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize speech that faithfully reflects the emotional content of sign language, thereby opening new possibilities for more natural sign language communication. Our code will be available upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10413
Cross-modal retrieval between audio recordings and symbolic music representations (MIDI) remains challenging because continuous waveforms and discrete event sequences encode different aspects of the same performance. We study descriptor injection, the augmentation of modality-specific encoders with hand-crafted domain features, as a bridge across this gap. In a three-phase campaign covering 13 descriptor-mechanism combinations, 6 architectural families, and 3 training schedules, the best configuration reaches a mean S of 84.0 percent across five independent seeds, improving the descriptor-free baseline by 8.8 percentage points. Causal ablation shows that the audio descriptor A4, based on octave-band energy dynamics, drives the gain in the top dual models, while the MIDI descriptor D4 has only a weak inference-time effect despite improving training dynamics. We also introduce reverse cross-attention, where descriptor tokens query encoder features, reducing attention operations relative to the standard formulation while remaining competitive. CKA analysis shows that descriptors substantially increase audio-MIDI transformer layer alignment, indicating representational convergence rather than simple feature concatenation. Perturbation analysis identifies high-frequency octave bands as the dominant discriminative signal. All experiments use MAESTRO v3.0.0 with an evaluation protocol controlling for composer and piece similarity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10283
Automatic depression detection using speech signals with acoustic and textual modalities is a promising approach for early diagnosis. Depression-related patterns exhibit sparsity in speech: diagnostically relevant features occur in specific segments rather than being uniformly distributed. However, most existing methods treat all frames equally, assuming depression-related information is uniformly distributed and thus overlooking this sparsity. To address this issue, we proposes a depression detection network based on Adaptive Cross-Modal Gating (ACMG) that adaptively reassigns frame-level weights across both modalities, enabling selective attention to depression-related segments. Experimental results show that the depression detection system with ACMG outperforms baselines without it. Visualization analyses further confirm that ACMG automatically attends to clinically meaningful patterns, including low-energy acoustic segments and textual segments containing negative sentiments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10181
The psychological profile that structurally documents the case of a depression patient is essential for psychotherapy. Large language models can be applied to summarize the profiles from counseling speech, however, it may suffer from long-context forgetting and produce unverifiable hallucinations, due to overlong length of speech, multi-party interactions and unstructured chatting. Hereby, we propose a StreamProfile, a streaming framework that processes counseling speech incrementally, extracts evidences grounded from ASR transcriptions by storing it in a Hierarchical Evidence Memory, and then performs a Chain-of-Thought pipeline according to PM+ psychological intervention for clinical reasoning. The final profile is synthesized strictly from those evidences, making every claim traceable. Experiments on real-world teenager counseling speech have shown that the proposed StreamProfile system can accurately generate the profiles and prevent hallucination.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10161
This study addresses a key limitation in deep learning Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) models, which perform well at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) but degrade under noisy conditions due to conventional feature extraction suppressing both discriminative structure and interference. The goal was to develop a feature-preserving denoising method that mitigates the loss of modulation class separation. A deep learning AMC model was proposed, incorporating a cross-channel self-attention block to capture dependencies between in-phase and quadrature components, along with dual-path deep residual shrinkage denoising blocks to suppress noise. Experiments using the RML2018.01a dataset employed stratified sampling across 24 modulation types and 26 SNR levels. Results showed that denoising depth strongly influences robustness at low and moderate SNRs. Compared to benchmark models PET-CGDNN, MCLDNN, and DAE, the proposed model achieved notable accuracy improvements across -8 dB to +2 dB SNR, with increases of 3%, 2.3%, and 14%, respectively. Cross-validation confirmed the model's robustness, yielding a mean accuracy of 62.6%, macro precision of 65.8%, macro-recall of 62.6%, and macro-F1 score of 62.9%. The architecture advances interference-aware AMC by formalizing baseband modeling as orthogonal subproblems and introducing cross-channel attention as a generalized complex interaction operator, with ablations confirming the critical role of feature-preserving denoising for robustness at low-to-medium SNR.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10054
Self-supervised music foundation models underperform on key detection, which requires pitch-sensitive representations. In this work, we present the first systematic study showing that the design of self-supervised pretraining directly impacts pitch sensitivity, and demonstrate that masked contrastive embeddings uniquely enable state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in key detection in the supervised setting. First, we discover that linear evaluation after masking-based contrastive pretraining on Mel spectrograms leads to competitive performance on music key detection out of the box. This leads us to train shallow but wide multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on features extracted from our base model, leading to SOTA performance without the need for sophisticated data augmentation policies. We further analyze robustness and show empirically that the learned representations naturally encode common augmentations. Our study establishes self-supervised pretraining as an effective approach for pitch-sensitive MIR tasks and provides insights for designing and probing music foundation models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10021
Multimodal music creation requires models that can both generate audio from high-level cues and edit existing mixtures in a targeted manner. Yet most multimodal music systems are built for a single task and a fixed prompting interface, making their conditioning brittle when guidance is ambiguous, temporally misaligned, or partially missing. Common additive fusion or feature concatenation further weakens cross-modal grounding, often causing prompt drift and spurious musical content during generation and editing. We propose MAGE, a modality-agnostic framework that unifies multimodal music generation and mixture-grounded editing within a single continuous latent formulation. At its core, MAGE uses a Controlled Multimodal FluxFormer, a flow-based Transformer that learns controllable latent trajectories for synthesis and editing under any available subset of conditions. To improve grounding, we introduce Audio-Visual Nexus Alignment to select temporally consistent visual evidence for the audio timeline, and a cross-gated modulation mechanism that applies multiplicative control from aligned visual and textual cues to the audio latents, suppressing unsupported components rather than injecting them. Finally, we train with a dynamic modality-masking curriculum that exposes the model to text-only, visual-only, joint multimodal, and mixture-guided settings, enabling robust inference under missing modalities without training separate models. Experiments on the MUSIC benchmark show that MAGE supports effective multimodal-guided music generation and targeted editing, achieving competitive quality while offering a lightweight and flexible interface tailored to practical music workflows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09803
Full-duplex dialogue audio, in which each speaker is recorded on a separate track, is an important resource for spoken dialogue research, but is difficult to collect at scale. Most in-the-wild two-speaker dialogue is available only as degraded monaural mixtures, making it unsuitable for systems requiring clean speaker-wise signals. We propose DialogueSidon, a model for joint restoration and separation of degraded monaural two-speaker dialogue audio. DialogueSidon combines a variational autoencoder (VAE) operates on the speech self-supervised learning (SSL) model feature, which compresses SSL model features into a compact latent space, with a diffusion-based latent predictor that recovers speaker-wise latent representations from the degraded mixture. Experiments on English, multilingual, and in-the-wild dialogue datasets show that DialogueSidon substantially improves intelligibility and separation quality over a baseline, while also achieving much faster inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09344
Audio super-resolution aims to recover missing high-frequency details from bandwidth-limited low-resolution audio, thereby improving the naturalness and perceptual quality of the reconstructed signal. However, most existing methods directly operate in the waveform or time-frequency domain, which not only involves high-dimensional generation spaces but is also largely limited to speech tasks, leaving substantial room for improvement on more complex audio types such as sound effects and music. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce LatentFlowSR, a new audio super-resolution approach that leverages conditional flow matching (CFM) within a latent representation space. Specifically, we first train a noise-robust autoencoder, which encodes low-resolution audio into a continuous latent space. Conditioned on the low-resolution latent representation, a CFM mechanism progressively generates the corresponding high-resolution latent representation from a Gaussian prior with a one-step ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver. The resulting high-resolution latent representation is then decoded by the pretrained autoencoder to reconstruct the high-resolution audio. Experimental results demonstrate that LatentFlowSR consistently outperforms baseline methods across various audio types and super-resolution settings. These results indicate that the proposed method possesses strong high-frequency reconstruction capability and robust generalization performance, providing compelling evidence for the effectiveness of latent-space modeling in audio super-resolution. All relevant code will be made publicly available upon completion of the paper review process.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09188
We present AccompGen, a system that generates instrumental music audio to accompany input vocals. Given isolated singing voice, AccompGen produces a coherent instrumental accompaniment that can be directly mixed with the input to create complete music. We propose three key innovations over prior work: (1) a dual-rate codec tokenization scheme using HuBERT semantic tokens at 50,Hz for vocals and EnCodec acoustic tokens at 75,Hz for instrumentals, enabling time-aligned yet rate-independent modeling; (2) a three-stage hierarchical autoregressive architecture (semantic to coarse acoustic to fine acoustic) with interleaved multi-codebook prediction and classifier-free guidance; and (3) modern Transformer design choices including QK-norm, GEGLU activations, RMSNorm, and T5-style relative position bias for improved training stability and sequence generalization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09054
Pitch-based sonification of quantitative data increases the accessibility of data visualizations that are otherwise inaccessible for blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals. We argue that, although pitch representations can reveal the coarse-grained information of data, such as data trend and value comparison, they cannot effectively convey the fine-grained details like the sign and exact value of individual data points. Informed by existing sound perception research, we propose a spatial audio-based approach by representing data values as the sound direction in the azimuth plane to achieve accessible fine-grained data representation. We conducted a user study with 26 participants (including 10 BLV participants) on four data perception tasks. The results show our approach significantly outperforms pitch representation on fine-grained data perception tasks like recognizing data signs and exact values, and performs similarly on data trend identification, despite its inferior accuracy on data value comparison.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08979
Spatial audio is fundamental to immersive virtual experiences, yet synthesizing high-fidelity binaural audio from sparse observations remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on implicit neural representations conditioned on visual priors, which often struggle to capture fine-grained acoustic structures. Inspired by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), we introduce AudioGS, a novel visual-free framework that explicitly encodes the sound field as a set of Audio Gaussians based on spectrograms. AudioGS associates each time-frequency bin with an Audio Gaussian equipped with dual Spherical Harmonic (SH) coefficients and a decay coefficient. For a target pose, we render binaural audio by evaluating the SH field to capture directionality, incorporating geometry-guided distance attenuation and phase correction, and reconstructing the waveform. Experiments on the Replay-NVAS dataset demonstrate that AudioGS successfully captures complex spatial cues and outperforms state-of-the-art visual-dependent baselines. Specifically, AudioGS reduces the magnitude reconstruction error (MAG) by over 14% and reduces the perceptual quality metric (DPAM) by approximately 25% compared to the best performing visual-guided method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08967
Word error rate (WER) is the dominant metric for automatic speech recognition, yet it cannot detect a systematic failure mode: models that produce fluent output in the wrong writing system. We define Script Fidelity Rate (SFR), the fraction of hypothesis characters in the target script block, computable without reference transcriptions, and report the first systematic measurement of script collapse across six languages spanning four writing systems (Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Somali) and nine ASR models on FLEURS test sets. Across 53 evaluated model-language pairs, 18 (34%; 95% Wilson CI: 23-47%) exhibit script collapse (SFR < 10%); MMS-1B and SeamlessM4T-v2 maintain SFR above 99% on every language evaluated, confirming that SFR correctly identifies high fidelity where it is present. We identify three distinct collapse patterns: Latin phonetic substitution (smaller Whisper on Indic languages), Arabic substitution for Somali's Latin-script orthography, and Devanagari substitution where larger Whisper models treat all Indic audio as Hindi, a failure present even in Whisper large-v3.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08786
While micro-scale traffic simulations provide essential data for urban planning, they are rarely coupled with the high-fidelity visualization or auralization necessary for effective stakeholder communication. In this work, we present a real-time 4D visualization framework that couples the SUMO traffic with a photorealistic, geospatially accurate VR representation of Zurich in Unreal Engine 5. Our architecture implements a robust C++ data pipeline for synchronized vehicle visualization and features an Open Sound Control (OSC) interface to support external auralization engines. We validate the framework through a user study assessing the correlation between simulated traffic dynamics and human perception. Results demonstrate a high degree of perceptual alignment, where users correctly interpret safety risks from the 4D simulation. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the inclusion of spatialized audio alters the user's sense of safety, showing the importance of multimodality in traffic simulations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08497