# PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12282 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12282/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 24 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
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- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching Guide and Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06264/) (2024)
- [Rotary Position Embedding for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13298/) (2024)
- [Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12247/) (2018)
- [Stable Audio Open](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14358/) (2024)
- [MERT: Acoustic Music Understanding Model with Large-Scale Self-supervised Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00107/) (2023)
- [Adapting Frechet Audio Distance for Generative Music Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01616/) (2023)
- [Polyffusion: A Diffusion Model for Polyphonic Score Generation with Internal and External Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10304/) (2023)
- [Music2Latent: Consistency Autoencoders for Latent Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06500/) (2024)
- [miditok: A Python package for MIDI file tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17202/) (2023)
- [KAD: No More FAD! An Effective and Efficient Evaluation Metric for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15602/) (2025)
- [Scoring Time Intervals using Non-Hierarchical Transformer For Automatic Piano Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09466/) (2024)
- [Latent Diffusion Bridges for Unsupervised Musical Audio Timbre Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06096/) (2024)
- [Online Symbolic Music Alignment with Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00466/) (2023)
- [RenderBox: Expressive Performance Rendering with Text Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07711/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Timbre Transfer Via Mutual Information Guided Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01294/) (2026)
- [GuitarFlow: Realistic Electric Guitar Synthesis From Tablatures via Flow Matching and Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21872/) (2025)
- [PianoCoRe: Combined and Refined Piano MIDI Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06627/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.