@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}
}
@conference {2022,
	title = {HEAR 2021: Holistic Evaluation of Audio Representations},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR): NeurIPS 2021 Competition Track},
	year = {2022},
	abstract = {What audio embedding approach generalizes best to a wide range of downstream tasks across a variety of everyday domains without fine-tuning? The aim of the HEAR 2021 NeurIPS challenge is to develop a general-purpose audio representation that provides a strong basis for learning in a wide variety of tasks and scenarios. HEAR 2021 evaluates audio representations using a benchmark suite across a variety of domains, including speech, environmental sound, and music. In the spirit of shared exchange, each participant submitted an audio embedding model following a common API that is general-purpose, open-source, and freely available to use. Twenty-nine models by thirteen external teams were evaluated on nineteen diverse downstream tasks derived from sixteen datasets. Open evaluation code, submitted models and datasets are key contributions, enabling comprehensive and reproducible evaluation, as well as previously impossible longitudinal studies. It still remains an open question whether one single general-purpose audio representation can perform as holistically as the human ear.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03022},
	author = {Joseph Turian and Jordie Shier and Humair Raj Khan and Bhiksha Raj and Bj{\"o}rn W. Schuller and Christian J. Steinmetz and Colin Malloy and George Tzanetakis and Gissel Velarde and Kirk McNally and Max Henry and Nicolas Pinto and Camille Noufi and Christian Clough and D. Herremans and Eduardo Fonseca and Jesse Engel and Justin Salamon and Philippe Esling and Pranay Manocha and Shinji Watanabe and Zeyu Jin and Yonatan Bisk}
}
