Highlights/Upcoming events

Introducing Iruka: a modern file manager for macOS

This one is a little different from what I usually post here. Most of my work is research in the Audio, Music, and AI Lab. But I've also recently built a piece of software of my own, that I to share: Iruka, a modern file manager for macOS.

Here's how it came about. We code a lot at the lab and we push our machines hard. Over a single day I might go from university forms and grant applications to student papers, then on to Python, JavaScript, LaTeX and Bash. The file manager is what I use to move between all of those jobs, and macOS Finder was holding me back more and more. I tried the alternatives, Path Finder and ForkLift, and neither did what I needed.

So I started building my own in the evenings and on weekends. What makes Iruka different is that its terminal stays in sync with the folder you're browsing. Whenever you open the terminal, it's already in the folder you're looking at. From there you can run Claude (or whichever AI assistant you like), a quick pdftk command, or a git commit. Git is also built into the interface, so you can see status, commit, pull and push without leaving the folder.

If that sounds useful, you can try it at iruka.sh.

Master your music with our AI Mastering studio at Sequential AI

You can make a song today with a laptop, an instrument and a microphone, and some people make them on just a phone. Finishing that song so it holds up next to everything else on a playlist is much harder. That stretch, from rough recording to release, is the last mile of music production. We spun off Sequential AI, to help you master a song with easy text controls. Are you a musician? Try our open beta now.

Read how it works.

What if music similarity wasn't a single number?

Most retrieval and recommendation systems collapse melody, rhythm, and timbre into one monolithic score, making it hard to understand why two pieces are considered similar, let alone perform more nuanced searches.
In our latest work from AMAAI Lab at SUTD, we introduce MERIT (Music rEpresentations for dIsentangled similaRiTy) -- a framework that learns separate, interpretable representations for each of these three dimensions, built on top of a frozen foundation model.

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Proceedings of EAIM available in PMLR!

A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of organizing the Workshop on Emerging AI Technologies for Music @AAAI in Singapore.

I’m excited to share that our workshop proceedings are now officially published in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research!

Explore the full proceedings here: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v303/

Editors: Dorien Herremans, Keshav Bhandari, Abhinaba Roy, Ph.D., Simon Colton, Mathieu Barthet

Can AI really compose band-quality music - with structure, harmony, and creative control?

That’s the question we set out to explore in our latest work, BandCondiNet, now accepted in Expert Systems with Applications!

Conditional music generation promises more user control, but current systems often struggle with three things:
- low-fidelity input conditions,
- weak structural coherence, and
- poor harmony across instruments.

SonicMaster - all-in-one mastering model

Ever struggled with cleaning up home-recorded music? Issues like weird echoes, distortion, uneven sound, or mastering to bring your music up to production-level quality can be a huge pain to fix — usually needing several different tools and lots of tweaking.

We just released SonicMaster, a model that aims to simplify this process by handling all those common problems in one place. The coolest part? You can control it with simple text instructions ('Make the audio smoother and less distorted.'') or let it automatically restore your audio.

Congratulations Dr. Jan on graduating!

Congratulations Dr. Jan Melechovsky on obtaining your PhD! I’ve had the pleasure to guide Jan through his PhD journey at the AMAAI lab at Singapore University of Technology and Design. The last five years, Jan has explored a number of fascinating (yet connected ; ) topics, ranging from dysarthric speech analysis to text-to-music.

Some highlights:

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AMAAI is organizing EAIM workshop at AAAI

Together with the AIM at QMUL, the AMAAI Lab is organizing the First Workshop on Emerging AI Technologies for Music (EAIM 2026) as part of the AAAI conference 2026 in Singapore.

The workshop will bring together researchers, industry leaders, and practitioners working at the intersection of AI and music. We’ll explore how advances in generative models, multimodal learning, personalization, explainability, and human–AI collaboration are shaping the future of music creation, analysis, and interaction.

Royalties in the age of AI: paying artists for AI-generated songs

As we celebrate World IP Day tomorrow, it’s a fitting time to reflect on how generative AI is transforming music creation, producing impressibly polished tracks in seconds, while also raising vital questions about fairly compensating artists whose work is used to train these models. I explore this topic in my article featured in the World Intellectual Property Organization – WIPO Magazine’s' special issue on Music and IP, 'Royalties in the age of AI: paying artists for AI-generated songs'.

PhD Fellowship Opportunities at SUTD

I am thrilled to announce two PhD fellowship opportunities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) for talented Thai students, Singaporean students, and Singapore Permanent Residents (PR). These fully-funded positions are available in the fields of AI for Finance and AI for Music, hosted by the AIFi Lab (AI for Finance) and AMAAI Lab (Audio, Music, and AI Lab), respectively. We are seeking exceptional candidates with a passion for AI and strong academic backgrounds to join our vibrant research community.

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What should I work on next?

"What should I work on next?", is the question we are trying to answer in our latest paper.

The arrival of LLMs and foundational models have significantly changed the field of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR Conference).

Many of the researchers in the field have had to pivot or adapt to the changing environment and the powerful tools that we now have available. The question many of us are asking is: what topics remain unexplored and are in need of solving?

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Text2midi at AAAI

I’m thrilled to introduce text2midi, an end-to-end trained AI model designed to bridge the gap between textual descriptions and MIDI file generation! Our paper has been accepted in the Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and will be presented in Philadelphia the coming month.

Presenting MidiCaps and MIRFLEX at ISMIR in San Francisco

Exciting news from the AMAAI Lab at this year’s ISMIR conference in San Francisco! We were thrilled to showcase some of our research:

MidiCaps
Presented by Jan Melechovsky and Abinaba Roy, MidiCaps is the first large-scale open midi dataset with text captions. This resource will enable us to develop the very first text-to-midi models (stay tuned -- our lab's model is coming soon!).

Visit from ZJU

The AMAAI Lab was honoured to receive Prof. Kejun Zhang and Jiaxing Yu from Zhejiang University last week.

It was fascinating to hear about their latest research in multimodal AI, affective computing for music, latest large datasets, and cool image-based music generation interfaces. I am looking forward to future collaboration!

AMAAI: Abhinaba Roy, Ph.D., Renhang Liu, 路通宇, Geeta Puri, Sithumi Kavindya, Jan Melechovsky, Charlotta-Marlena Geist

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