Singapore

Neural codec language models have revolutionized speech synthesis but face significant challenges when adapted to music generation, particularly in achieving precise timbre con- trol while preserving melodic content. We introduce Neural Code Language Model for Controllable Timbre Transfer (NCLMCTT), a novel architecture that enables zero-shot instrument cloning through direct audio conditioning without explicit timbre learning. Our approach combines a 385M-parameter transformer for coarse musical structure modeling with a specialized upsampler for fine timbral detail, achieving flexible control through 1-5 second reference audio segments. We establish the first comprehensive benchmark dataset for controllable timbre transfer evaluation, comprising 62,500 high-fidelity samples across 50 synthesizer presets with ground truth targets. Extensive experiments demonstrate sub- stantial improvements over the TokenSynth baseline: 27.1% reduction in SI-SDR, 50.9% in Mel Distance, and 59.4% in STFT Distance, while maintaining strong melodic coher- ence (Chroma Similarity: 0.85). Our method achieves robust zero-shot generalization, with performance on unseen instrument presets matching that of seen presets. Ablation stud- ies confirm that extended reference audio duration (40.8% improvement), cross-attention mechanisms (11.9% improvement), and increased model capacity contribute meaningfully to overall performance. By separating melodic content from timbral characteristics and enabling implicit timbre control, NCLMCTT provides both immediate practical value for music creators and a methodological foundation for advancing controllable neural audio synthesis.

AAAI 2026

Neural Codec Language Model for Controllable Timbre Transfer in Music Synthesis

controllable music synthesis

timbre transfer

neural codec language models

audio generation

zero-shot generalization

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

workshop paper

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

With recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR), large language models (LLMs), and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies, spoken dialogue systems (SDS) have become widely accessible. However, most existing SDS are limited to conventional spoken responses. We present SingingSDS, a cascaded SDS that responds through singing rather than speaking, fostering more affective, memorable, and pleasurable interactions in character-based roleplay and interactive entertainment scenarios. SingingSDS employs a modular ASR-LLM-SVS pipeline and supports a wide range of configurations across character personas, ASR and LLM backends, SVS models, melody sources, and voice profiles, tailored to different needs in terms of latency, quality, and musical style. SingingSDS is available as a plug-and-play web demo, featuring modular, open-source code that supports customization and extension. Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/espnet/SingingSDS. Code: https://github.com/SingingSDS/SingingSDS. Video: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZpUJJbwp2WvtPBenG5D3h09qKIrt24ui&si=7CSLWAYWcfkTEdqe.

SingingSDS: A Singing-Capable Spoken Dialogue System for Conversational Roleplay Applications

This paper traces how “control” is socially coded in contemporary music technology, and offers an account of the circuit of control to bridge the conceptual gap between the sociopolitical and the technical. The analysis redirects attention from the controllability of intelligent systems to the social formations through which control is allocated and recognized. To frame this shift, the paper theorizes the gear economy—a lens set alongside the much frequented concept gig economy in sociology—to explain how AI-music tools (e.g., Suno, Udio) are legitimated through existing music gear markets. The claim is coalition rather than addition: AI tools fold into pre-existing markets that price and credential controllability. Formally, the paper adopts a triptych that deliberately echoes Deleuze’s influential “Postscript” in title and cadence: Historical, Logic, Programming to progress its analysis. Rather than constructing a new vocabulary of control in music technologies, this paper demonstrates that the parameters and regimes of control—technical, economic, and political—are themselves social indices. The aim is a design-oriented ethical intervention that speaks to technologists, musicians, and the general public, rendering these arrangements visible and reconfigurable and redirecting control toward humans so that AI music tools augment rather than shrink creative agency.

Postscript on the Musics of Control

We present Artificial Dancing Intelligence (ADI), an interactive neural music visualizer that is accessed through a web app, but performs inference entirely on local devices. Our approach enables anyone to visually express music, while leveraging the expressive, and sometimes unpredictable dynamics of self-organized systems. ADI uses an audio stream’s average energy (known as RMS) to modulate a neural cellular automata (NCA) to produce visual patterns that move and ’dance’ along with the audio stream in real time. Through the web interface, users can adjust the relationship between the music’s energy and the NCA system to create unique visual performances out of any music audio file. ADI achieves smooth, real-time responsiveness on modern consumer devices.

Artificial Dancing Intelligence: Neural Cellular Automata for Visual Performance of Music

Artists and rights holders face growing concerns about unauthorized use of their copyrighted works in training generative models. We introduce TS-RaMIA, a practical auditing framework enabling creators to test whether their symbolic music has been used without authorization. Unlike existing likelihood-based approaches that are confounded by piece length and density, TS-RaMIA exploits \emph{structural tokens}—bar lines, positions, and tempo markers encoding musical phrasing—through sample-level analysis and rigorous debiasing. Our method combines (i) length matching and conditional calibration to remove spurious confounders, (ii) tail-of-top- aggregation on structural tokens to amplify sparse memorization signals, and (iii) a lightweight meta-attacker fusing statistical cues via composer-stratified cross-validation. Evaluated on a 67M-parameter REMI Transformer trained on MAESTRO pieces, TS-RaMIA achieves AUC 0.826 and TPR@1%FPR 14.6%, while a debiased baseline drops to AUC 0.563. Cross-representation validation on NotaGen (ABC notation) yields comparable performance (AUC 0.73, TPR@1%FPR 8.9%), demonstrating transferability. We release our code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TS-RaMIA-63F0.

TS-RaMIA: Membership Inference Attacks for Symbolic Music Generation Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) claim “musical understanding,” yet most evaluations conflate listening with score reading. We benchmark three SOTA LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Qwen2.5-Omni) across three core music skills: Syncopation Scoring (rhythm perception), Transposition Detection (melody perception), and Chord Quality Identification (harmony perception). Moreover, we separate three sources of variability: (i) perceptual limitations (by contrasting audio recordings vs. symbolic MIDI inputs), (ii) exposure to prior examples (zero- vs. few-shot manipulations), and (iii) reasoning strategies (Standalone, Chain of Thought, LogicLM). For the latter we adapt LogicLM, a framework combining LLMs with symbolic solvers to perform structured reasoning. In LogicLM, LLMs act as perceptual formulators, generating strict, machinecheckable schemas (onset grids, interval sequences) that deterministic solvers execute with self-refinement. Our results reveal a clear perceptual gap: models perform near ceiling on MIDI but show substantial accuracy drops on audio. Reasoning and few-shot prompting o!er minimal gains. This is expected for MIDI, where performance reaches saturation, but more surprising for audio, where LogicLM, despite near-perfect MIDI accuracy, remains notably brittle. Among models, Gemini Pro achieves the highest performance across most conditions. Transposition yields the highest accuracies across models, while Chord Identification scores slightly below Syncopation. Overall, current systems reason well over symbols (MIDI) but do not yet ”listen” reliably from audio, with reasoning strategies having little impact over accuracy. Our method and dataset make the perception–reasoning boundary explicit and o!er actionable guidance for building robust, audio music systems.

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