English

UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions

Audio and Speech Processing 2026-04-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Sound

Abstract

Generative audio modeling has largely been fragmented into specialized tasks, text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-music (TTM), and text-to-audio (TTA), each operating under heterogeneous control paradigms. Unifying these modalities remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic dissonance between structured semantic representations (speech/music) and unstructured acoustic textures (sound effects). In this paper, we introduce UniSonate, a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, and sound effects through a standardized, reference-free natural language instruction interface. To reconcile structural disparities, we propose a novel dynamic token injection mechanism that projects unstructured environmental sounds into a structured temporal latent space, enabling precise duration control within a phoneme-driven Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT). Coupled with a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy, this approach effectively mitigates cross-modal optimization conflicts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSonate achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS (WER 1.47%) and TTM (SongEval Coherence 3.18), while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. Crucially, we observe positive transfer, where joint training on diverse audio data significantly enhances structural coherence and prosodic expressiveness compared to single-task baselines. Audio samples are available at https://qiangchunyu.github.io/UniSonate/.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.22209,
  title  = {UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions},
  author = {Chunyu Qiang and Xiaopeng Wang and Kang Yin and Yuzhe Liang and Yuxin Guo and Teng Ma and Ziyu Zhang and Tianrui Wang and Cheng Gong and Yushen Chen and Ruibo Fu and Chen Zhang and Longbiao Wang and Jianwu Dang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.22209},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACL 2026 main conference (oral)