
A team of generative AI researchers created a Swiss Army knife for sound, one that allows users to control the audio output simply using text.
While some AI models can compose a song or modify a voice, none have the dexterity of the new offering.
Called Fugatto (short for Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1), it generates or transforms any mix of music, voices and sounds described with prompts using any combination of text and audio files.
For example, it can create a music snippet based on a text prompt, remove or add instruments from an existing song, change the accent or emotion in a voice - even let people produce sounds never heard before.
This thing is wild, said Ido Zmishlany, a multi-platinum producer and songwriter - and cofounder of One Take Audio, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups. Sound is my inspiration. It's what moves me to create music. The idea that I can create entirely new sounds on the fly in the studio is incredible.
A Sound Grasp of Audio We wanted to create a model that understands and generates sound like humans do, said Rafael Valle, a manager of applied audio research at NVIDIA and one of the dozen-plus people behind Fugatto, as well as an orchestral conductor and composer.
Supporting numerous audio generation and transformation tasks, Fugatto is the first foundational generative AI model that showcases emergent properties - capabilities that arise from the interaction of its various trained abilities - and the ability to combine free-form instructions.
Fugatto is our first step toward a future where unsupervised multitask learning in audio synthesis and transformation emerges from data and model scale, Valle said.
A Sample Playlist of Use Cases For example, music producers could use Fugatto to quickly prototype or edit an idea for a song, trying out different styles, voices and instruments. They could also add effects and enhance the overall audio quality of an existing track.
The history of music is also a history of technology. The electric guitar gave the world rock and roll. When the sampler showed up, hip-hop was born, said Zmishlany. With AI, we're writing the next chapter of music. We have a new instrument, a new tool for making music - and that's super exciting.
An ad agency could apply Fugatto to quickly target an existing campaign for multiple regions or situations, applying different accents and emotions to voiceovers.
Language learning tools could be personalized to use any voice a speaker chooses. Imagine an online course spoken in the voice of any family member or friend.
Video game developers could use the model to modify prerecorded assets in their title to fit the changing action as users play the game. Or, they could create new assets on the fly from text instructions and optional audio inputs.
Making a Joyful Noise One of the model's capabilities we're especially proud of is what we call the avocado chair, said Valle, referring to a novel visual created by a generative AI model for imaging.
For instance, Fugatto can make a trumpet bark or a saxophone meow. Whatever users can describe, the model can create.
With fine-tuning and small amounts of singing data, researchers found it could handle tasks it was not pretrained on, like generating a high-quality singing voice from a text prompt.
Users Get Artistic Controls Several capabilities add to Fugatto's novelty.
During inference, the model uses a technique called ComposableART to combine instructions that were only seen separately during training. For example, a combination of prompts could ask for text spoken with a sad feeling in a French accent.
The model's ability to interpolate between instructions gives users fine-grained control over text instructions, in this case the heaviness of the accent or the degree of sorrow.
I wanted to let users combine attributes in a subjective or artistic way, selecting how much emphasis they put on each one, said Rohan Badlani, an AI researcher who designed these aspects of the model.
In my tests, the results were often surprising and made me feel a little bit like an artist, even though I'm a computer scientist, said Badlani, who holds a master's degree in computer science with a focus on AI from Stanford.
The model also generates sounds that change over time, a feature he calls temporal interpolation. It can, for instance, create the sounds of a rainstorm moving through an area with crescendos of thunder that slowly fade into the distance. It also gives users fine-grained control over how the soundscape evolves.
Plus, unlike most models, which can only recreate the training data they've been exposed to, Fugatto allows users to create soundscapes it's never seen before, such as a thunderstorm easing into a dawn with the sound of birds singing.
A Look Under the Hood Fugatto is a foundational generative transformer model that builds on the team's prior work in areas such as speech modeling, audio vocoding and audio understanding.
The full version uses 2.5 billion parameters and was trained on a bank of NVIDIA DGX systems packing 32 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.
Fugatto was made by a diverse group of people from around the world, including India, Brazil, China, Jordan and South Korea. Their collaboration made Fugatto's multi-accent and multilingual capabilities stronger.
One of the hardest parts of the effort was generating a blended dataset that contains millions of audio samples used for training. The team employed a multifaceted strategy to generate data and instructions that considerably expanded the range of tasks the model could perform, while achieving more accurate performance and enabling new tasks without requiring additional data.
They also scrutinized existing datasets to reveal new relationships among the dat
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
14/11/2026
Marcelo Dai's Live Session Captured with URSA Cine Immersive
Brie Clayton November 14, 2026
0 Comments
Artist takes viewers on an immersive journe...
14/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
14/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
14/11/2026
Newest Lenses, Horizon Anamorphic Seminar & Guided Lens Character Experience Highlight Creative Possibilities
At the 2026 Toru CAMERIMAGE Film Festival, ZEISS...
14/11/2026
Sonnet Announces Black Friday Sale on Select Products
Brie Clayton November 14, 2026
0 Comments
WHAT: Sonnet Technologies is having a sale on a select...
14/11/2026
Berklee Alumni Shine at the 2026 Latin Grammy Awards This year's winners included songwriters, engineers, and performers who contributed to acclaimed reco...
13/11/2026
The UIM E1 Series wraps its third season this week with the Bombay Sapphire E1 Miami GP, Nov. 11-14, on Biscayne Bay at the Miami Seaplane Base on Watson Island...
13/11/2026
In-venue and creative video staffers at the professional and collegiate level ha...
13/11/2026
Singer-songwriter Benson Boone will headline entertainment for the Discover NHL Winter Classic between the Utah Mammoth and Colorado Avalanche at Rice-Eccles St...
13/11/2026
Blackmagic Design has announced the Blackmagic Ambisonic Microphone, a 7th order ambisonic microphone array that captures spatial audio for immersive video prod...
13/11/2026
SMPTE has announced that The Studio B&H and Riedel Communications will provide the video infrastructure and communications technology for the Solutions Hub at t...
13/11/2026
The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) has announced the theme and program focus for the 2027 HPA Tech Retreat, which takes place Feb. 14-18, 2027, in La ...
13/11/2026
Football Manager 27 Touch is available on Apple Arcade starting today. The game ...
13/11/2026
MotoGP has announced a two-year media rights agreement with ESPN covering the Un...
13/11/2026
Apple Sports, the free iPhone app, has added the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to its lineup of supported sports, in time for Saturday's UFC 334. The...
13/11/2026
The NBA and Fanatics Studios, the joint venture between Fanatics and entertainme...
13/11/2026
ESPN held its annual EDGE Innovation Conference last night and offered up an ove...
13/11/2026
Regional sports network gives Ithaca College, SUNY Cortland students a platform to thrive
One of the biggest games in Division III college football will be pla...
13/11/2026
Studer-inspired 500-series PWM compressor unveiled
The HLabs range already includes a couple of Studer-inspired offerings in the form of the PRE169 and EQ16...
13/11/2026
Download Now!
To view the white paper, please enter the following details:
--
First Name* First Name
Company*
Country* Please select your countryA...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Blue Lucy, the workflow orchestration and integration platform for broadcasters, rights owners and localisation companies, today announced an integration with c...
13/11/2026
Krotos announces Black Friday offers on Studio Pro and Studio Max
Brie Clayton November 12, 2026
0 Comments
First-year annual plans start at US$195.99...
13/11/2026
Blackmagic Design Announces Blackmagic Ambisonic Microphone
Brie Clayton November 12, 2026
0 Comments
New 7th order ambisonic microphone with 108 MEMS...
13/11/2026
Meet the Berklee Student Setting Planetary Motion to Music With his compositional platform SoniKosmos, Javier Roqueni aims to make the universe the ultimate i...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , er...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , er...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Share
{alert(Link copied)}).catch(err => {console.error(Failed to copy: , err)}) data-platform=copy_link data-action= class=font-ui-heading py-2 text-sm tex...
13/11/2026
Amagi, the media industry cloud company, today announced a partnership with Golden Times Media Technology (stock code 920021.BJ), a Beijing-based media and tech...
13/11/2026
CGI (TSX: GIB.A) (NYSE: GIB), one of the largest independent IT and business consulting services firms in the world, together with its Malaysian partner, Cedar ...
13/11/2026
SMPTE, the home for media professionals, technologists and engineers, today announced that The Studio B&H and Riedel Communications will provide the video infra...
13/11/2026
iWedia, a global leader in connected TV software solutions, will present its software-first approach to DRAM optimization at Android TV APAC Summit 2026 in Bang...
13/11/2026
Beginning today, November 13, Apple HomeView is available for purchase at Apple Store locations, on the Apple Store online, and in the Apple Store app in select...
13/11/2026
From pediatric research to smart hospitals, AI is helping care teams spend less time on routine tasks and more time with patients.
Health systems and startups...
12/11/2026
Industry leaders examine how Dynamic Media Facility, Media eXchange Layer, and c...
12/11/2026
The junior Tar Heel is embracing the technical and creative challenges of live production while emerging as a leader and mentor in the control room...
12/11/2026
Gracenote, Nielsen's content intelligence business, has released its fifth a...
12/11/2026
RTL Deutschland will bring the NHL to free-to-air TV in Germany starting Nov. 30...
12/11/2026
Clear-Com supported On Air 2026, a 24-hour student-led broadcast connecting 45 u...