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About: I am Head of the Music AI group at Adobe Research. My research interests include audio and music, generative AI, and signal processing. I received my PhD and MA from CCRMA, Stanford University and MS in Electrical Eng., also from Stanford. Before that, I received my Bachelor of Music and BS in Electrical Eng. with summa cum laude, general honors, and departmental honors at the U. of Miami-FL. I have received 2 best paper awards, 1 AES Graduate Design Gold award, 1 best reviewer award, and 1 best paper finalist award. I was general co-chair of WASPAA 2023, a 2x elected member of the IEEE AASP TC, an IEEE Senior Member, and am an Adobe distinguished inventor.

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News

[10/2025] Adobe Firefly Generate Soundtrack Released! web
[10/2025] New TMLR journal paper! DRAGON: Distributional Rewards Optimize Diffusion Generative Models arXiv, web, video
[04/2025] "Beyond Text to Music" Keynote Talk at ICASSP 2025 GenDA Workshop. slides
[02/2025] Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation accepted to ICLR (Spotlight, top 5%) web.
[11/2024] ISMIR 2024 x Adobe Industry Panel Talk.
[06/2024] DITTO-2: Distilled Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation accepted to ISMIR 2024.
[06/2024] MusicHiFi: Fast High-Fidelity Stereo Vocoding accepted to IEEE SPL. arXiv | web | video
[05/2024] DITTO: Diffusion Inference-time T-Optimization for Music Generation accepted to ICML (oral, top 1.5%). arXiv | web | video
[04/2024] Music ControlNet: Multiple Time-varying Controls for Music Generation accepted to IEEE TASLP. arXiv | web | video
[02/2024] Project Music GenAI Control Adobe News.
[10/2023] IEEE WASPAA 2023 General Co-Chair (w/Minje Kim).

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Adobe Internships

For current students, I offer research internships at Adobe Research in San Francisco, CA. Internships are typically during the summer months and for graduate students studying audio/music signal processing, machine learning, or related field. If you are interested, please send me an email with your CV and research interests in October-December before the given summer. My Adobe webpage is here.

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Publications

	"DRAGON: Distributional Rewards Optimize Diffusion Generative Models" Y. Bai J. Casebeer S. Sojoudi N. J. Bryan arXiv, April, 2025. (arXiv, web, video)
	"Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation" Z. Novack G. Zhu J. Casebeer J. McAuley, T. Berg-Kirkpatrick, N. J. Bryan ICLR (Spotlight, top 5%), April, 2025. (arXiv, web, video)
	"MusicHiFi: Fast High-Fidelity Stereo Vocoding" G. Zhu J.-P. Caceres, Z. Duan, N. J. Bryan IEEE SPL, March, 2024. (arXiv, web, video)
	"DITTO: Diffusion Inference-time T-Optimization for Music Generation" Z. Novack J. McAuley, T. Berg-Kirkpatrick, N. J. Bryan ICML (oral, top 1.5%), January, 2024. (arXiv, web, video)
	"Music ControlNet: Multiple Time-varying Controls for Music Generation" S-L. Wu C. Donahue, S. Watanabe, N. J. Bryan Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processsing (TASLP), November, 2023. (arXiv, web, video)
	"Meta-AF: Meta-learning for Adaptive Filters." J. Casebeer N. J. Bryan, P. Smaragdis IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processsing (TASLP), January, 2022. Presented at IEEE International Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), June, 2023. (TASLP, arXiv, web, code, video)
	"Style Transfer of Audio Effects with Differentiable Signal Processing." C. J. Steinmetz, N. J. Bryan, J. D. Reiss, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES), September, 2022. Presented at 154th AES Europe Convention, May, 2023. (arXiv, code, demo)
	"Meta-learning for Adaptive Filters with Higher-order Frequency Dependencies." J. Wu, J. Casebeer N. J. Bryan, P. Smaragdis, IEEE Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC), September, 2022. (arXiv, code, demo)
	"Don't Separate, Learn to Remix: End-to-End Neural Remixing with Joint Optimization." H. Yang, S. Firodiya N. J. Bryan, M. Kim, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2022. (arXiv, paper code)
	"Emotion Embedding Spaces for Matching Music to Stories." M. Won, J. Salamon N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore, X. Serra International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), 2021. (code, paper) ISMIR Best Student Paper Award Winner
	"Deep Embeddings and Section Fusion Improve Music Segmentation." J. Salamon O. Nieto, N. J. Bryan, International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), 2021. (code, paper)
	"Who Calls the Shots? Rethinking Few-Shot Learning for Audio." Y. Wang, N. J. Bryan, J. Salamon M. Cartwright, J. P. Bello IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), 2021. (arXiv, data, code, paper, full talk) IEEE WASPAA Special Best Paper Award Winner
	"Auto-DSP: Learning to Optimize Acoustic Echo Cancellers." J. Casebeer, N. J. Bryan P. Smaragdis, IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), 2021. (arXiv, web, code, paper, short talk, full talk)
	"Differentiable Signal Processing with Black-Box Audio Effects." M. A. Martínez Ramírez, O. Wang, P. Smaragdis, N. J. Bryan IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2021. (arXiv, web, code, ieee explore, paper long-talk)
	"Few-shot Continual Learning for Audio Classification." Y. Wang, N. J. Bryan, M. Cartwright, J.-P. Bello, J. Salamon IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2021. (paper, ieee explore)
	"Context-aware Prosody Correction for Text-based Speech Editing." M. Morrison, L. Rencker, Z. Jin, N. J. Bryan, J.P. Caceres, B. Pardo IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2021. (arXiv, web, paper)
	"A Differentiable Perceptual Audio Metric Learned from Just Noticeable Differences." P. Manocha, A. Finkelstein, R. Zhang, N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore, Z. Jin Interspeech, 2020. (arXiv, web, code) Interspeech Best Student Paper Finalist
	"Controllable Neural Prosody Synthesis." M. Morrison, Z. Jin, J. Salamon, N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore Interspeech, 2020. (paper | arXiv, web)
	"Metric Learning vs Classification for Disentangled Music Representation Learning." J. Lee, N. J. Bryan, J. Salamon, Z. Jin J. Nam International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), 2020. (paper | arXiv | web)
	"Few-shot Drum Transcription in Polyphonic Music." Y. Wang, J. Salamon, M. Cartwright, N. J. Bryan, J.-P. Bello International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), 2020. (paper | arXiv)
	"Disentangled Multidimensional Metric Learning For Music Similarity." J. Lee, N. J. Bryan, J. Salamon, Z. Jin J. Nam IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2020. (project page | paper | ieee link | arXiv | talk | data set)
	"One-Shot Parametric Audio Production Style Transfer With Application to Frequency Equalization." S. I. Mimilakis, N. J. Bryan, P. Smaragdis IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2020. (project page | paper | ieee link | talk)
	"Few-Shot Sound Event Detection." Y. Wang, J. Salamon, N. J. Bryan, J.-P. Bello IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2020. (paper | ieee link | talk)
	"Impulse Response Data Augmentation and Deep Neural Networks For Blind Room Acoustic Parameter Estimation." N. J. Bryan IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2020. (paper | ieee link | talk)
	"Scene-Aware Audio Rendering via Deep Acoustic Analysis." Z. Tang N. J. Bryan D. Li T. Langlois D. Manocha IEEE VR Journal Track (TVCG), 2020. (paper | ieee | arXiv | project page | video )
	"ISSE: An Interactive Source Separation Editor." N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore, G. Wang Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2014. (project page | paper | video)
	"Interactive Sound Source Separation." N. J. Bryan. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. March, 2014. (PhD Thesis) * ISSE: An Interactive Source Separation Editor (talk 1) (talk 2) * Software (link) * C++ code (link) * Matlab code (link) * Demos (link) * SiSEC results (link) * Publications (link) AES Graduate Student Design Gold Award
	"Source Separation of Polyphonic Music With Interactive User-Feedback on a Piano Roll Display." N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore, G. Wang International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), 2013. (web | paper)
	"An Efficient Posterior Regularized Latent Variable Model for Interactive Sound Source Separation." N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2013. (web | paper | sisec | Adobe MAX | poster | slides)
	"Interactive Refinement of Supervised and Semi-Supervised Sound Source Separation Estimates." N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2013. (web | pre-print | poster)
	"Interactive User-Feedback for Sound Source Separation." N. J. Bryan, G. J. Mysore International Conf. on Intelligent User-Interfaces, Workshop on Interative Machine Learning, 2013. (web | abstract)
	"User-Guided Variable-Rate Time-Stretching Via Stiffness Control." N. J. Bryan, J. Herrera, G. Wang International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFX), 2012. (web | paper | slides (long) | slides (short) )
	"Clustering and Synchronizing Multi-Camera Video via Landmark Cross-Correlation" N. J. Bryan, P. Smaragdis, G. J. Mysore IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2012. (paper | poster | pre-print | slides, Adobe MAX)
	"Musical Influence Network Analysis and Rank of Sampled-Based Music." N. J. Bryan, G. Wang International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), 2011. (paper | whosampled | slides)
	"Two Turntables and a Mobile Phone." N. J. Bryan, G. Wang International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), 2011. (paper | slides | web)
	"Instinct-Based Mating in Genetic Algorithms Applied to the Tuning of 1-NN Classifiers." T. Quirino, M. Kubat, N. J. Bryan IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), December, 2010. (paper)
	"Methods For Extending Room Impulse Responses Beyond Their Noise Floor." N. J. Bryan, J. S. Abel Audio Engineering Society Convention (AES), 2010. (paper | slides | web)
	"Impulse Response Measurements in the Presence of Clock Drift." N. J. Bryan, M. A. Kolar, J. S. Abel Audio Engineering Society Convention (AES), 2010. (paper | slides | web)
	"Estimating Room Impulse Responses from Recorded Balloon Pops." J. S. Abel N. J. Bryan, P. Huang, M. A. Kolar, B. Pentcheva, Audio Engineering Society Convention (AES), 2010. (paper | slides | web)
	"Approximating Measured Reverberation Using A Hybrid Fixed/Switched Convolution Structure." K. Lee, N. J. Bryan, J. S. Abel International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFX), 2010. (paper | web)
	"MoMu: A Mobile Music Toolkit." N. J. Bryan, J. Herrera, J. Oh, G. Wang International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), 2010. (paper | web | speaker hands | slides)
	"Evolving The Mobile Phone Orchestra." J. Oh, J. Herrera, N. J. Bryan, L. Dahl, G. Wang International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), 2010. (paper | speaker hands)
	"A Configurable Microphone Array with Acoustically Transparent Omnidirectional Elements." J. S. Abel N. J. Bryan, T. Skare, M. A. Kolar, P. Huang, D. Mostowfi, J. O. Smith III Audio Engineering Society Convention (AES), 2009. (paper | poster | web)
	"Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk)." G. Wang N. J. Bryan, J. Oh, R. Hamilton, International Computer Music Conference (ICML), 2009. (pdf: paper | web | speakers )

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