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

arXiv cs.AI / 4/27/2026

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Key Points

  • UniSonate is a new unified generative-audio model that can synthesize speech, music, and sound effects from a standardized, reference-free natural-language instruction interface.
  • The paper proposes a dynamic token injection mechanism that maps unstructured environmental sounds into a structured temporal latent space to enable precise duration control within a phoneme-driven Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT).
  • To address optimization conflicts across modalities, UniSonate uses a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy that helps stabilize cross-modal training.
  • Experiments report state-of-the-art results for instruction-based TTS (WER 1.47%) and text-to-music coherence (SongEval Coherence 3.18), with competitive fidelity for sound-effect generation, plus positive transfer from joint multi-audio training.
  • Audio samples are provided online, and the work is released as an arXiv preprint (arXiv:2604.22209v1).

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/.

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