Beauty and the Beat: Music-Driven Choral Conducting With Beat-Aware Diffusion

Authors: Cheng, B., Ni, S., Xi, Y., Du, S., Zhang, J.J., Yang, X.

Journal: Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds

Publication Date: 01/05/2026

Volume: 37

Issue: 3

eISSN: 1546-427X

ISSN: 1546-4261

DOI: 10.1002/cav.70151

Abstract:

Music-driven motion generation has attracted increasing attention, yet conducting remains underexplored despite its central role in musical communication. We address this gap with a focus on choral conducting. We introduce Maestro3D, a large-scale 3D dataset of professional performances, and propose a beat-aware diffusion framework enhanced by a novel phase-based beat representation that explicitly encodes rhythmic structure. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our approach achieves superior accuracy, realism, and synchronization compared to existing methods.

Source: Scopus