Foundation Models for Music: A Survey

In recent years, foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs) and latent diffusion models (LDMs) have profoundly impacted diverse sectors, including music. This comprehensive review examines state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained models and foundation models in music, spanning from representation learning, generative learning and multimodal learning. We first contextualise the significance of music in various industries and trace the evolution of AI in music. By delineating the modalities targeted by foundation models, we discover many of the music representations are underexplored in FM development. Then, emphasis is placed on the lack of versatility of previous methods on diverse music applications, along with the potential of FMs in music understanding, generation and medical application. By comprehensively exploring the details of the model pre-training paradigm, architectural choices, tokenisation, finetuning methodologies and controllability, we emphasise the important topics that should have been well explored, like instruction tuning and in-context learning, scaling law and emergent ability, as well as long-sequence modelling etc. A dedicated section presents insights into music agents, accompanied by a thorough analysis of datasets and evaluations essential for pre-training and downstream tasks. Finally, by underscoring the vital importance of ethical considerations, we advocate that following research on FM for music should focus more on such issues as interpretability, transparency, human responsibility, and copyright issues. The paper offers insights into future challenges and trends on FMs for music, aiming to shape the trajectory of human-AI collaboration in the music realm.

MMTrail: A Multimodal Trailer Video Dataset with Language and Music Descriptions

Massive multi-modality datasets play a significant role in facilitating the success of large video-language models. However, current video-language datasets primarily provide text descriptions for visual frames, considering audio to be weakly related information. They usually overlook exploring the potential of inherent audio-visual correlation, leading to monotonous annotation within each modality instead of comprehensive and precise descriptions. Such ignorance results in the difficulty of multiple cross-modality studies. To fulfill this gap, we present MMTrail, a large-scale multi-modality video-language dataset incorporating more than 20M trailer clips with visual captions, and 2M high-quality clips with multimodal captions. Trailers preview full-length video works and integrate context, visual frames, and background music. In particular, the trailer has two main advantages: (1) the topics are diverse, and the content characters are of various types, e.g., film, news, and gaming. (2) the corresponding background music is custom-designed, making it more coherent with the visual context. Upon these insights, we propose a systemic captioning framework, achieving various modality annotations with more than 27.1k hours of trailer videos. Here, to ensure the caption retains music perspective while preserving the authority of visual context, we leverage the advanced LLM to merge all annotations adaptively. In this fashion, our MMtrail dataset potentially paves the path for fine-grained large multimodal-language model training. In experiments, we provide evaluation metrics and benchmark results on our dataset, demonstrating the high quality of our annotation and its effectiveness for model training.

VidMuse: A Simple Video-to-Music Generation Framework with Long-Short-Term Modeling

In this work, we systematically study music generation conditioned solely on the video. First, we present a large-scale dataset comprising 190K video-music pairs, including various genres such as movie trailers, advertisements, and documentaries. Furthermore, we propose VidMuse, a simple framework for generating music aligned with video inputs. VidMuse stands out by producing high-fidelity music that is both acoustically and semantically aligned with the video. By incorporating local and global visual cues, VidMuse enables the creation of musically coherent audio tracks that consistently match the video content through Long-Short-Term modeling. Through extensive experiments, VidMuse outperforms existing models in terms of audio quality, diversity, and audio-visual alignment. The code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/ZeyueT/VidMuse/.

LLMs Meet Multimodal Generation and Editing: A Survey

With the recent advancement in large language models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in combining LLMs with multimodal learning. Previous surveys of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) mainly focus on understanding. This survey elaborates on multimodal generation across different domains, including image, video, 3D, and audio, where we highlight the notable advancements with milestone works in these fields. Specifically, we exhaustively investigate the key technical components behind methods and multimodal datasets utilized in these studies. Moreover, we dig into tool-augmented multimodal agents that can use existing generative models for human-computer interaction. Lastly, we also comprehensively discuss the advancement in AI safety and investigate emerging applications as well as future prospects. Our work provides a systematic and insightful overview of multimodal generation, which is expected to advance the development of Artificial Intelligence for Generative Content (AIGC) and world models. A curated list of all related papers can be found at https://github.com/YingqingHe/Awesome-LLMs-meet-Multimodal-Generation

ComposerX: Multi-Agent Symbolic Music Composition with LLMs

Music composition represents the creative side of humanity, and itself is a complex task that requires abilities to understand and generate information with long dependency and harmony constraints. While demonstrating impressive capabilities in STEM subjects, current LLMs easily fail in this task, generating ill-written music even when equipped with modern techniques like In-Context-Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts. To further explore and enhance LLMs' potential in music composition by leveraging their reasoning ability and the large knowledge base in music history and theory, we propose ComposerX, an agent-based symbolic music generation framework. We find that applying a multi-agent approach significantly improves the music composition quality of GPT-4. The results demonstrate that ComposerX is capable of producing coherent polyphonic music compositions with captivating melodies, while adhering to user instructions.

Seeing and Hearing: Open-domain Visual-Audio Generation with Diffusion Latent Aligners

Video and audio content creation serves as the core technique for the movie industry and professional users. Recently, existing diffusion-based methods tackle video and audio generation separately, which hinders the technique transfer from academia to industry. In this work, we aim at filling the gap, with a carefully designed optimization-based framework for cross-visual-audio and joint-visual-audio generation. We observe the powerful generation ability of off-the-shelf video or audio generation models. Thus, instead of training the giant models from scratch, we propose to bridge the existing strong models with a shared latent representation space. Specifically, we propose a multimodality latent aligner with the pre-trained ImageBind model. Our latent aligner shares a similar core as the classifier guidance that guides the diffusion denoising process during inference time. Through carefully designed optimization strategy and loss functions, we show the superior performance of our method on joint video-audio generation, visual-steered audio generation, and audio-steered visual generation tasks. The project website can be found at https://yzxing87.github.io/Seeing-and-Hearing/

ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in text generation, we find that their ability has yet to be generalized to music, humanity's creative language. We introduce ChatMusician, an open-source LLM that integrates intrinsic musical abilities. It is based on continual pre-training and finetuning LLaMA2 on a text-compatible music representation, ABC notation, and the music is treated as a second language. ChatMusician can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without any external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. Interestingly, endowing musical abilities does not harm language abilities, even achieving a slightly higher MMLU score. Our model is capable of composing well-structured, full-length music, conditioned on texts, chords, melodies, motifs, musical forms, etc, surpassing GPT-4 baseline. On our meticulously curated college-level music understanding benchmark, MusicTheoryBench, ChatMusician surpasses LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5 on zero-shot setting by a noticeable margin. Our work reveals that LLMs can be an excellent compressor for music, but there remains significant territory to be conquered. We release our 4B token music-language corpora MusicPile, the collected MusicTheoryBench, code, model and demo in GitHub.

MARBLE: Music Audio Representation Benchmark for Universal Evaluation

In the era of extensive intersection between art and Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as image generation and fiction co-creation, AI for music remains relatively nascent, particularly in music understanding. This is evident in the limited work on deep music representations, the scarcity of large-scale datasets, and the absence of a universal and community-driven benchmark. To address this issue, we introduce the Music Audio Representation Benchmark for universaL Evaluation, termed MARBLE. It aims to provide a benchmark for various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks by defining a comprehensive taxonomy with four hierarchy levels, including acoustic, performance, score, and high-level description. We then establish a unified protocol based on 14 tasks on 8 public-available datasets, providing a fair and standard assessment of representations of all open-sourced pre-trained models developed on music recordings as baselines. Besides, MARBLE offers an easy-to-use, extendable, and reproducible suite for the community, with a clear statement on copyright issues on datasets. Results suggest recently proposed large-scale pre-trained musical language models perform the best in most tasks, with room for further improvement. The leaderboard and toolkit repository are published at https://marble-bm.shef.ac.uk to promote future music AI research.

Mixed Neural Voxels for Fast Multi-view Video Synthesis

Synthesizing high-fidelity videos from real-world multi-view input is challenging because of the complexities of real-world environments and highly dynamic motions. Previous works based on neural radiance fields have demonstrated high-quality reconstructions of dynamic scenes. However, training such models on real-world scenes is time-consuming, usually taking days or weeks. In this paper, we present a novel method named MixVoxels to better represent the dynamic scenes with fast training speed and competitive rendering qualities. The proposed MixVoxels represents the 4D dynamic scenes as a mixture of static and dynamic voxels and processes them with different networks. In this way, the computation of the required modalities for static voxels can be processed by a lightweight model, which essentially reduces the amount of computation, especially for many daily dynamic scenes dominated by the static background. To separate the two kinds of voxels, we propose a novel variation field to estimate the temporal variance of each voxel. For the dynamic voxels, we design an inner-product time query method to efficiently query multiple time steps, which is essential to recover the high-dynamic motions. As a result, with 15 minutes of training for dynamic scenes with inputs of 300-frame videos, MixVoxels achieves better PSNR than previous methods. Codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/fengres/mixvoxels