# Prevailing Research Areas for Music AI in the Era of Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09378 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09378/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 89 of its 153 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Steering Language Models With Activation Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10248/) (2023)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [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)
- [MusicLM: Generating Music From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11325/) (2023)
- [What do you learn from context? Probing for sentence structure in contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06316/) (2019)
- [Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13382/) (2022)
- [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)
- [FMA: A Dataset For Music Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01840/) (2016)
- [Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04222/) (2023)
- [MERT: Acoustic Music Understanding Model with Large-Scale Self-supervised Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00107/) (2023)
- [From Attribution Maps to Human-Understandable Explanations through Concept Relevance Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03208/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Transformers for Music Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08553/) (2022)
- [Wave-U-Net: A Multi-Scale Neural Network for End-to-End Audio Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03185/) (2018)
- [Can Language Models Encode Perceptual Structure Without Grounding? A Case Study in Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06129/) (2021)
- [A Survey on the Fairness of Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03761/) (2022)
- [Mustango: Toward Controllable Text-to-Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08355/) (2023)
- [Music Source Separation in the Waveform Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13254/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MelodySim: Measuring Melody-aware Music Similarity for Plagiarism Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20979/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Parallel to rapid advancements in foundation model research, the past few years have witnessed a surge in music AI applications. As AI-generated and AI-augmented music become increasingly mainstream, many researchers in the music AI community may wonder: what research frontiers remain unexplored? This paper outlines several key areas within music AI research that present significant opportunities for further investigation. We begin by examining foundational representation models and highlight emerging efforts toward explainability and interpretability. We then discuss the evolution toward multimodal systems, provide an overview of the current landscape of music datasets and their limitations, and address the growing importance of model efficiency in both training and deployment. Next, we explore applied directions, focusing first on generative models. We review recent systems, their computational constraints, and persistent challenges related to evaluation and controllability. We then examine extensions of these generative approaches to multimodal settings and their integration into artists' workflows, including applications in music editing, captioning, production, transcription, source separation, performance, discovery, and education. Finally, we explore copyright implications of generative music and propose strategies to safeguard artist rights. While not exhaustive, this survey aims to illuminate promising research directions enabled by recent developments in music foundation models.