# MAGIC-TTS: Fine-Grained Controllable Speech Synthesis with Explicit Local Duration and Pause Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21164 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21164/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15888/) (2026)
- [WordVoice: Explicit and Decoupled Multi-Dimensional Word-Level Control for LLM-Based TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06461/) (2026)
- [SCIC: Scope- and Codebook-Aware Instruction Conditioning for Speaker-Adapted Expressive TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39088/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-grained local timing control is still absent from modern text-to-speech systems: existing approaches typically provide only utterance-level duration or global speaking-rate control, while precise token-level timing manipulation remains unavailable. To the best of our knowledge, MAGIC-TTS is the first TTS model with explicit local timing control over token-level content duration and pause. MAGIC-TTS is enabled by explicit token-level duration conditioning, carefully prepared high-confidence duration supervision, and training mechanisms that correct zero-value bias and make the model robust to missing local controls. On our timing-control benchmark, MAGIC-TTS substantially improves token-level duration and pause following over spontaneous synthesis. Even when no timing control is provided, MAGIC-TTS maintains natural high-quality synthesis. We further evaluate practical local editing with a scenario-based benchmark covering navigation guidance, guided reading, and accessibility-oriented code reading. In this setting, MAGIC-TTS realizes a reproducible uniform-timing baseline and then moves the edited regions toward the requested local targets with low mean bias. These results show that explicit fine-grained controllability can be implemented effectively in a high-quality TTS system and can support realistic local timing-editing applications.