Gerhard Widmer

Deepak Kumar, Emmanouil Karystinaios, Gerhard Widmer et al.

Music often shares notable parallels with language, motivating the use of pretrained large language models (LLMs) for symbolic music understanding and generation. Despite growing interest, the practical effectiveness of adapting instruction-tuned LLMs to symbolic music remains insufficiently characterized. We present a controlled comparative study of finetuning strategies for ABC-based generation and understanding, comparing an off-the-shelf instruction-tuned backbone to domain-adapted variants and a music-specialized LLM baseline. Across multiple symbolic music corpora and evaluation signals, we provide some insights into adaptation choices for symbolic music applications. We highlight the domain adaptation vs.~preserving prior information tradeoff as well as the distinct behaviour of metrics used to measure the domain adaptation for symbolic music.

Tobias Morocutti, Emmanouil Karystinaios, Jonathan Greif et al.

Music Source Restoration (MSR) targets recovery of original, unprocessed instrument stems from fully mixed and mastered audio, where production effects and distribution artifacts violate common linear-mixture assumptions. This technical report presents the CP-JKU team's system for the MSR ICASSP Challenge 2025. Our approach decomposes MSR into separation and restoration. First, a single BandSplit-RoFormer separator predicts eight stems plus an auxiliary other stem, and is trained with a three-stage curriculum that progresses from 4-stem warm-start fine-tuning (with LoRA) to 8-stem extension via head expansion. Second, we apply a HiFi++ GAN waveform restorer trained as a generalist and then specialized into eight instrument-specific experts.