# Combining audio control and style transfer using latent diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00341/) (2020)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward a Meaningful and Decodable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15640/) (2021)
- [MusicLM: Generating Music From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11325/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Fr'echet Audio Distance: A Metric for Evaluating Music Enhancement Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08466/) (2018)
- [Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12247/) (2018)
- [Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04825/) (2024)
- [DDSP: Differentiable Digital Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04643/) (2020)
- [Noise2Music: Text-conditioned Music Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03917/) (2023)
- [SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07837/) (2016)
- [Cutting Music Source Separation Some Slakh: A Dataset to Study the Impact of Training Data Quality and Quantity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08494/) (2019)
- [Music ControlNet: Multiple Time-varying Controls for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07069/) (2023)
- [RAVE: A variational autoencoder for fast and high-quality neural audio synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05011/) (2021)
- [S3VAE: Self-Supervised Sequential VAE for Representation Disentanglement and Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11437/) (2020)
- [Creating A Multi-track Classical Musical Performance Dataset for Multimodal Music Analysis: Challenges, Insights, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08727/) (2016)
- [Multi-instrument Music Synthesis with Spectrogram Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05408/) (2022)
- [Contrastively Disentangled Sequential Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12091/) (2021)
- [A Lightweight Instrument-Agnostic Model for Polyphonic Note Transcription and Multipitch Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09893/) (2022)
- [A Universal Music Translation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07848/) (2018)
- [Disentangled Recurrent Wasserstein Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07496/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Editing Music with Melody and Text: Using ControlNet for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05151/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Fast Generative-Based Singing Voice Separation using a Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20470/) (2025)
- [DARC: Drum accompaniment generation with fine-grained rhythm control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02357/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Disentangled Representations for Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10058/) (2026)
- [Anysynth:Zero-Shot Instrument Cloning via In-Context Learning and Asymmetric Hierarchical Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11143/) (2026)
- [MusGU+: Toward a Musician-Centered Evaluation Framework and Discovery Tool for Generative Music AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30940/) (2026)
- [Annotation-Free MIDI-to-Audio Synthesis via Concatenative Synthesis and Generative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16785/) (2024)
- [Remix the Timbre: Diffusion-Based Style Transfer Across Polyphonic Stems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09259/) (2026)
- [SCAPES: Semantically Conditioned Autoregressive Prior for Environmental Sounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04634/) (2026)
- [Synthesis and editing of multi-instrument audio mixtures using scalar-quantised latents with MIDI Span conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25546/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep generative models are now able to synthesize high-quality audio signals, shifting the critical aspect in their development from audio quality to control capabilities. Although text-to-music generation is getting largely adopted by the general public, explicit control and example-based style transfer are more adequate modalities to capture the intents of artists and musicians. In this paper, we aim to unify explicit control and style transfer within a single model by separating local and global information to capture musical structure and timbre respectively. To do so, we leverage the capabilities of diffusion autoencoders to extract semantic features, in order to build two representation spaces. We enforce disentanglement between those spaces using an adversarial criterion and a two-stage training strategy. Our resulting model can generate audio matching a timbre target, while specifying structure either with explicit controls or through another audio example. We evaluate our model on one-shot timbre transfer and MIDI-to-audio tasks on instrumental recordings and show that we outperform existing baselines in terms of audio quality and target fidelity. Furthermore, we show that our method can generate cover versions of complete musical pieces by transferring rhythmic and melodic content to the style of a target audio in a different genre.