Tornike Karchkhadze

Tornike Karchkhadze, Shlomo Dubnov

We present a framework for real-time human-AI musical co-performance, in which a latent diffusion model generates instrumental accompaniment in response to a live stream of context audio. The system combines a MAX/MSP front-end-handling real-time audio input, buffering, and playback-with a Python inference server running the generative model, communicating via OSC/UDP messages. This allows musicians to perform in MAX/MSP - a well-established, real-time capable environment - while interacting with a large-scale Python-based generative model, overcoming the fundamental disconnect between real-time music tools and state-of-the-art AI models. We formulate accompaniment generation as a sliding-window look-ahead protocol, training the model to predict future audio from partial context, where system latency is a critical constraint. To reduce latency, we apply consistency distillation to our diffusion model, achieving a 5.4x reduction in sampling time, with both models achieving real-time operation. Evaluated on musical coherence, beat alignment, and audio quality, both models achieve strong performance in the Retrospective regime and degrade gracefully as look-ahead increases. These results demonstrate the feasibility of diffusion-based real-time accompaniment and expose the fundamental trade-off between model latency, look-ahead depth, and generation quality that any such system must navigate.

Tornike Karchkhadze, Mohammad Rasool Izadi, Shuo Zhang et al.

In this work, we propose an approach to music source separation that uses a generative diffusion model as a last-stage refinement on top of a deterministic separator, progressively enhancing the separated sources through iterative denoising. While the diffusion refinement yields measurable quality gains, it requires iterative steps at inference, increasing computational cost. To speed up the inference process, we apply consistency distillation, reducing inference to a single step while maintaining quality; with two or more steps, the distilled model even surpasses the diffusion-based approach. Crucially, our method is architecture-agnostic: we demonstrate state-of-the-art results when applied to both a custom U-Net-based separator on Slakh2100 and the state-of-the-art BS-RoFormer model on MUSDB18, showing that the refinement generalizes across backbone architectures. Sound examples are available at: https://consistency-separation.github.io/.

Tornike Karchkhadze, Keren Shao, Shlomo Dubnov

This work presents a novel method for composing and improvising music inspired by Cornelius Cardew's Treatise, using AI to bridge graphic notation and musical expression. By leveraging OpenAI's ChatGPT to interpret the abstract visual elements of Treatise, we convert these graphical images into descriptive textual prompts. These prompts are then input into MusicLDM, a pre-trained latent diffusion model designed for music generation. We introduce a technique called "outpainting," which overlaps sections of AI-generated music to create a seamless and cohesive composition. We demostrate a new perspective on performing and interpreting graphic scores, showing how AI can transform visual stimuli into sound and expand the creative possibilities in contemporary/experimental music composition. Musical pieces are available at https://bit.ly/TreatiseAI