@conference {2026,
	title = {Emerging AI Technologies for Music: Towards Controllable, Collaborative, and Creative Systems},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, PMLR 303:1-5, 2026},
	year = {2026},
	abstract = {The field of AI and music has witnessed rapid growth in recent years driving notable success across domains such as music information retrieval (MIR), generative modelling, representation learning, source separation, and transcription among several others. The emergence of large-scale music foundation models (e.g., MusicLM, Suno, Riffusion) and multimodal systems combining modalities such as text, audio and video has further expanded the creative possibilities of AI-driven music. However, despite these technical advances, there remains a significant gap between the capabilities of current AI music systems and their practical adoption by musicians, composers, producers, and educators. At the same time, there has been a growing consensus in the community that recognizes the limitations of fully autonomous generation and the need for interactive, interpretable, controllable, and human-centred approaches. In light of this emerging trend to maintain meaningful human agency over the creative process, the editors of this special issue organized the first workshop on Emerging AI Technologies for Music, as part of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in 2026 at Singapore.

Full proceedings: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v303/},
	author = {K. Bhandari and A. Roy and S. Colton and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2026,
	title = {Text2Score: Generating Sheet Music From Textual Prompts},
	booktitle = {arXiv:2605.13431},
	year = {2026},
	abstract = {Developing text-driven symbolic music generation models remains challenging due to the scarcity of aligned text-music datasets and the unreliability of automated captioning pipelines. While most efforts have focused on MIDI, sheet music representations are largely underexplored in text-driven generation. We present Text2Score, a two-stage framework comprising a planning stage and an execution stage for generating sheet music from natural language prompts. By deriving supervision signals directly from symbolic XML data, we propose an alternative training paradigm that bypasses noisy or scarce text-music pairs. In the planning stage, an LLM orchestrator translates a natural language prompt into a structured measure-wise plan defining musical attributes such as instruments, key, time signatures, harmony, etc. This plan is then consumed by a generative model in the execution stage to produce interleaved ABC notation conditioned on the plan{\textquoteright}s structural constraints. To assess output quality, we introduce an evaluation framework covering playability, readability, instrument utilization, structural complexity, and prompt adherence, validated by expert musicians. Text2Score consistently outperforms both a pure LLM-based agentic framework and three end-to-end baselines across objective and subjective dimensions. We open-source the dataset, code, evaluation set and LLM prompts used in this work; a demo is available on our project page (https://keshavbhandari.github.io/portfolio/text2score).},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13431},
	author = {K. Bhandari and S. Chang and A. Roy and F. Ronchini and E. Benetos and D. Herremans and S. Colton}
}
@conference {2025,
	title = {ImprovNet: Generating Controllable Musical Improvisations with Iterative Corruption Refinement},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of IJCNN},
	year = {2025},
	address = {Rome, Italy},
	abstract = {Deep learning has enabled remarkable advances in style transfer across various domains, offering new possibilities for creative content generation. However, in the realm of symbolic music, generating controllable and expressive performance-level style transfers for complete musical works remains challenging due to limited datasets, especially for genres such as jazz, and the lack of unified models that can handle multiple music generation tasks. This paper presents ImprovNet, a transformer-based architecture that generates expressive and controllable musical improvisations through a self-supervised corruption-refinement training strategy. ImprovNet unifies multiple capabilities within a single model: it can perform cross-genre and intra-genre improvisations, harmonize melodies with genre-specific styles, and execute short prompt continuation and infilling tasks. The model{\textquoteright}s iterative generation framework allows users to control the degree of style transfer and structural similarity to the original composition. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate ImprovNet{\textquoteright}s effectiveness in generating musically coherent improvisations while maintaining structural relationships with the original pieces. The model outperforms Anticipatory Music Transformer in short continuation and infilling tasks and successfully achieves recognizable genre conversion, with 79\% of participants correctly identifying jazz-style improvisations. Our code and demo page can be found at this https URL (https://github.com/keshavbhandari/improvnet).},
	doi = {10.1109/IJCNN64981.2025.11229312},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04522},
	author = {K. Bhandari and S. Chang and T. Lu and F. R. Enus and L. B. Bradshaw and D. Herremans and S. Colton}
}
@article {2025,
	title = {Text2midi: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions},
	journal = {Proceedings of AAAI, Philadelphia},
	year = {2025},
	abstract = {This paper introduces text2midi, an end-to-end model to generate MIDI files from textual descriptions. Leveraging the growing popularity of multimodal generative approaches, text2midi capitalizes on the extensive availability of textual data and the success of large language models (LLMs). Our end-to-end system harnesses the power of LLMs to generate symbolic music in the form of MIDI files. Specifically, we utilize a pretrained LLM encoder to process captions, which then condition an autoregressive transformer decoder to produce MIDI sequences that accurately reflect the provided descriptions. This intuitive and user-friendly method significantly streamlines the music creation process by allowing users to generate music pieces using text prompts. We conduct comprehensive empirical evaluations, incorporating both automated and human studies, that show our model generates MIDI files of high quality that are indeed controllable by text captions that may include music theory terms such as chords, keys, and tempo. We release the code and music samples on our demo page (this https URL) for users to interact with text2midi.},
	url = {https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2412.16526},
	author = {K. Bhandari and A. Roy and K. Wang and G. Puri and S. Colton and D. Herremans}
}
