# MusicFlow: Cascaded Flow Matching for Text Guided Music Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Noise2Music: Text-conditioned Music Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03917/) (2023)
- [Comparative layer-wise analysis of self-supervised speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03929/) (2022)
- [Diff-Foley: Synchronized Video-to-Audio Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17203/) (2023)
- [UniAudio: An Audio Foundation Model Toward Universal Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00704/) (2023)
- [Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15821/) (2023)
- [Guided Flows for Generative Modeling and Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13443/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [FLowHigh: Towards Efficient and High-Quality Audio Super-Resolution with Single-Step Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04926/) (2025)
- [Audio Super-Resolution with Latent Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17609/) (2025)
- [InspireMusic: Integrating Super Resolution and Large Language Model for High-Fidelity Long-Form Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00084/) (2025)
- [From Faces to Voices: Learning Hierarchical Representations for High-quality Video-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16956/) (2025)
- [MR-FlowDPO: Multi-Reward Direct Preference Optimization for Flow-Matching Text-to-Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10264/) (2025)
- [Is There a Better Source Distribution than Gaussian? Exploring Source Distributions for Image Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18184/) (2025)
- [MusFlow: Multimodal Music Generation via Conditional Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13535/) (2025)
- [FlowSynth: Instrument Generation Through Distributional Flow Matching and Test-Time Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21667/) (2025)
- [Geometry-Aware Image Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25294/) (2026)
- [Anysynth:Zero-Shot Instrument Cloning via In-Context Learning and Asymmetric Hierarchical Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11143/) (2026)
- [Training-Efficient Text-to-Music Generation with State-Space Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14786/) (2026)
- [S2Accompanist: A Semantic-Aware and Structure-Guided Diffusion Model for Music Accompaniment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17414/) (2026)
- [JenBridge: Adaptive Long-Form Video Soundtracking across Scene Transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01703/) (2026)
- [SketchSong: Hierarchical Song Generation with Sketch Planning and Fine-Grained Multi-Track Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03169/) (2026)
- [YuE2: Unifying Symbolic and Audio Music Generation at Frontier Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33757/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce MusicFlow, a cascaded text-to-music generation model based on flow matching. Based on self-supervised representations to bridge between text descriptions and music audios, we construct two flow matching networks to model the conditional distribution of semantic and acoustic features. Additionally, we leverage masked prediction as the training objective, enabling the model to generalize to other tasks such as music infilling and continuation in a zero-shot manner. Experiments on MusicCaps reveal that the music generated by MusicFlow exhibits superior quality and text coherence despite being over 2~5 times smaller and requiring 5 times fewer iterative steps. Simultaneously, the model can perform other music generation tasks and achieves competitive performance in music infilling and continuation. Our code and model will be publicly available.