# Stemphonic: All-at-once Flexible Multi-stem Music Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09891 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09891/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [MusicLM: Generating Music From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11325/) (2023)
- [Applying Guidance in a Limited Interval Improves Sample and Distribution Quality in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07724/) (2024)
- [Fr'echet Audio Distance: A Metric for Evaluating Music Enhancement Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08466/) (2018)
- [Stable Audio Open](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14358/) (2024)
- [Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04825/) (2024)
- [Music ControlNet: Multiple Time-varying Controls for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07069/) (2023)
- [DITTO: Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12179/) (2024)
- [madmom: a new Python Audio and Music Signal Processing Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07008/) (2016)
- [Multi-Source Diffusion Models for Simultaneous Music Generation and Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02257/) (2023)
- [ComposerX: Multi-Agent Symbolic Music Composition with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18081/) (2024)
- [Moisesdb: A dataset for source separation beyond 4-stems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15913/) (2023)
- [Diff-A-Riff: Musical Accompaniment Co-creation via Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08384/) (2024)
- [StemGen: A music generation model that listens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08723/) (2023)
- [Joint Audio and Symbolic Conditioning for Temporally Controlled Text-to-Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10970/) (2024)
- [InstructME: An Instruction Guided Music Edit And Remix Framework with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14360/) (2023)
- [JEN-1 Composer: A Unified Framework for High-Fidelity Multi-Track Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19180/) (2023)
- [Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05167/) (2024)
- [COCOLA: Coherence-Oriented Contrastive Learning of Musical Audio Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16969/) (2024)
- [Simultaneous Music Separation and Generation Using Multi-Track Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12346/) (2024)

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

- [Soundwich: Video Generation with Layered and Controllable Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Music stem generation, the task of producing musically-synchronized and isolated instrument audio clips, offers the potential of greater user control and better alignment with musician workflows compared to conventional text-to-music models. Existing stem generation approaches, however, either rely on fixed architectures that output a predefined set of stems in parallel, or generate only one stem at a time, resulting in slow inference despite flexibility in stem combination. We propose Stemphonic, a diffusion-/flow-based framework that overcomes this trade-off and generates a variable set of synchronized stems in one inference pass. During training, we treat each stem as a batch element, group synchronized stems in a batch, and apply a shared noise latent to each group. At inference-time, we use a shared initial noise latent and stem-specific text inputs to generate synchronized multi-stem outputs in one pass. We further expand our approach to enable one-pass conditional multi-stem generation and stem-wise activity controls to empower users to iteratively generate and orchestrate the temporal layering of a mix. We benchmark our results on multiple open-source stem evaluation sets and show that Stemphonic produces higher-quality outputs while accelerating the full mix generation process by 25 to 50%. Demos at: https://stemphonic-demo.vercel.app.