SqueezeComposer: Temporal Speed-up is A Simple Trick for Long-form Music Composing

TL;DR

SqueezeComposer introduces a simple temporal speed-up technique that allows existing music generation models to efficiently produce long-form music by generating at higher speeds and then restoring the original tempo.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hierarchical generation approach using speed-up and slow-down strategies to enable long-form music synthesis with existing models.

Findings

Enables scalable long-form music generation.

Improves temporal control in music synthesis.

Achieves high-quality results with reduced computational resources.

Abstract

Composing coherent long-form music remains a significant challenge due to the complexity of modeling long-range dependencies and the prohibitive memory and computational requirements associated with lengthy audio representations. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful trick: we assume that AI models can understand and generate time-accelerated (speeded-up) audio at rates such as 2x, 4x, or even 8x. By first generating a high-speed version of the music, we greatly reduce the temporal length and resource requirements, making it feasible to handle long-form music that would otherwise exceed memory or computational limits. The generated audio is then restored to its original speed, recovering the full temporal structure. This temporal speed-up and slow-down strategy naturally follows the principle of hierarchical generation from abstract to detailed content, and can be conveniently applied to existing music generation models to enable long-form music generation. We instantiate this idea in SqueezeComposer, a framework that employs diffusion models for generation in the accelerated domain and refinement in the restored domain. We validate the effectiveness of this approach on two tasks: long-form music generation, which evaluates temporal-wise control (including continuation, completion, and generation from scratch), and whole-song singing accompaniment generation, which evaluates track-wise control. Experimental results demonstrate that our simple temporal speed-up trick enables efficient, scalable, and high-quality long-form music generation. Audio samples are available at https://SqueezeComposer.github.io/.