English

FlowSynth: Instrument Generation Through Distributional Flow Matching and Test-Time Search

Sound 2025-10-27 v1

Abstract

Virtual instrument generation requires maintaining consistent timbre across different pitches and velocities, a challenge that existing note-level models struggle to address. We present FlowSynth, which combines distributional flow matching (DFM) with test-time optimization for high-quality instrument synthesis. Unlike standard flow matching that learns deterministic mappings, DFM parameterizes the velocity field as a Gaussian distribution and optimizes via negative log-likelihood, enabling the model to express uncertainty in its predictions. This probabilistic formulation allows principled test-time search: we sample multiple trajectories weighted by model confidence and select outputs that maximize timbre consistency. FlowSynth outperforms the current state-of-the-art TokenSynth baseline in both single-note quality and cross-note consistency. Our approach demonstrates that modeling predictive uncertainty in flow matching, combined with music-specific consistency objectives, provides an effective path to professional-quality virtual instruments suitable for real-time performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.21667,
  title  = {FlowSynth: Instrument Generation Through Distributional Flow Matching and Test-Time Search},
  author = {Qihui Yang and Randal Leistikow and Yongyi Zang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.21667},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Submitted to ICASSP 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:04:21.105Z