Conditional Diffusion as Latent Constraints for Controllable Symbolic Music Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pettenó, Matteo, Mezza, Alessandro Ilic, Bernardini, Alberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pettenó, Matteo
Mezza, Alessandro Ilic
Bernardini, Alberto
author_facet Pettenó, Matteo
Mezza, Alessandro Ilic
Bernardini, Alberto
contents Recent advances in latent diffusion models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in high-dimensional time-series data synthesis while providing flexible control through conditioning and guidance. However, existing methodologies primarily rely on musical context or natural language as the main modality of interacting with the generative process, which may not be ideal for expert users who seek precise fader-like control over specific musical attributes. In this work, we explore the application of denoising diffusion processes as plug-and-play latent constraints for unconditional symbolic music generation models. We focus on a framework that leverages a library of small conditional diffusion models operating as implicit probabilistic priors on the latents of a frozen unconditional backbone. While previous studies have explored domain-specific use cases, this work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to demonstrate the versatility of such an approach across a diverse array of musical attributes, such as note density, pitch range, contour, and rhythm complexity. Our experiments show that diffusion-driven constraints outperform traditional attribute regularization and other latent constraints architectures, achieving significantly stronger correlations between target and generated attributes while maintaining high perceptual quality and diversity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07156
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conditional Diffusion as Latent Constraints for Controllable Symbolic Music Generation
Pettenó, Matteo
Mezza, Alessandro Ilic
Bernardini, Alberto
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
Recent advances in latent diffusion models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in high-dimensional time-series data synthesis while providing flexible control through conditioning and guidance. However, existing methodologies primarily rely on musical context or natural language as the main modality of interacting with the generative process, which may not be ideal for expert users who seek precise fader-like control over specific musical attributes. In this work, we explore the application of denoising diffusion processes as plug-and-play latent constraints for unconditional symbolic music generation models. We focus on a framework that leverages a library of small conditional diffusion models operating as implicit probabilistic priors on the latents of a frozen unconditional backbone. While previous studies have explored domain-specific use cases, this work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to demonstrate the versatility of such an approach across a diverse array of musical attributes, such as note density, pitch range, contour, and rhythm complexity. Our experiments show that diffusion-driven constraints outperform traditional attribute regularization and other latent constraints architectures, achieving significantly stronger correlations between target and generated attributes while maintaining high perceptual quality and diversity.
title Conditional Diffusion as Latent Constraints for Controllable Symbolic Music Generation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07156