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Learning Jazz Pianist Style with Cross-Attention Conditioning
An ISMIR 2026 project fine-tunes Aria, a transformer pretrained on piano MIDI, with gated cross-attention on embeddings for twelve jazz pianists from PiJAMA; conditioned continuations are attributed to the intended pianist 70% of the time versus 37% without conditioning, and a classifier trained only on generated music identifies real recordings with 95% accuracy.
5 min · 1,035 words
The MusicBrainz team announces Picard 3.0, a major release of the official MusicBrainz tag editor that moves to Qt6, introduces a completely new plugin system, and improves the user interface, cover art processing, and ISRC submission after 14 pre-releases and 393 resolved tickets.
13 min · 2,926 words
CHOMPI portable sampler is now open-source
CHOMPI Sampler Reference Hub Open Source Intro to CHOMPI Open Source This is a discontinuation open-source release: a permanent source for the files and documentation related to CHOMPI. To customize it, clone the repo into your own GitHub. While we won’t be doing any more file updates, the CHOMPI Club will live on in the Chase Bliss Discord](https://discord.gg/q3KcumMcBB). Check out the CHOMPI Open Source channel to discuss the project, share what you make, and see what others have made on their
4 min · 876 words
Coltrane's Tone CircleExploring the circle of fifths, its jazz applications, and Coltrane's geometric approach to harmony
A clear walkthrough of John Coltrane’s famous tone-circle sketch: the circle of fifths, geometric harmony, and how jazz musicians still use the diagram today.
11 min · 2,485 words
Shahid Hussain recounts a 15-year search for Salvage, a band whose two professionally produced tracks, Electric and Searchlights, he heard in 2011 before the band seemingly vanished. Generic names, a lost CD and thin online traces made it hard, until persistent digging finally connected him with the producer and musicians behind the songs.
10 min · 2,355 words
Notes on loading oliveoil22's Casio CZ-101 patch banks into the browser-based CZP-1 synthesizer, with downloadable JSON bank data and step-by-step library import instructions.
2 min · 363 words
ECHO presents Suzanne Ciani’s 1976 Buchla Cookbook as an open digital edition — original patches, diagrams, and a conversation with Ciani on documenting the Buchla 200 for composers and practitioners.
30 min · 6,971 words
What Is Gridification? The Hidden Shift in Recorded Music
Jeffrey Anthony of the Musical Form Institute defines 'gridification', the shift over 25 years toward recorded music locked to a quantized time grid, by comparing the 1975 and 2025 Billboard top five songs and arguing why the loss of human timing matters.
10 min · 2,241 words