music/CURRENCY_SWEEP_2026-08.md
CANON SUBORDINATION — this document is PROPOSAL-TIER: it serves canon and never outranks it.
Canon served: melody-first with hummable thirty-year leitmotifs; composed-never-prompted; the
no-human-composer-hire ruling (2026-08-08); the CVD §17.1 care line and the §17 floor; local-first
on the 5090; proof-before-spend.
If this document disagrees with canon, CANON WINS and this document is the defect.
TIER: CURRENCY SWEEP — PROPOSAL. ENGINE, not CANON. It sets no canon, names no region content,
changes no spine or registry row, installs nothing and spends nothing.
Written 2026-08-09. Lane: the August-2026 currency check over
docs/proposals/music/MUSIC_ARCHITECTURE_DECISION_BRIEF.md (revision 2, same day) and its two
step-back legs. Consumer: the AIVA benchmark session — so that the benchmark crowns an engine
against the real field and not last quarter's.
Josh's standing floor law, invoked verbatim this sitting:
we're using the best methods and structure"
His AIVA suggestion is the FLOOR. This sweep's only job was to check whether anything better exists
right now, by fetching primary sources rather than trusting the sibling docs' candidate set.
**The headline, stated before the evidence: the floor held, and it held for a reason the sibling
docs did not have.** The commercial field moved a long way between the brief's sources and today, and
it moved *away* from us — the two engines that got better got walled, watermarked or restricted to
text prompts. **AIVA is still the only commercial engine in the field that will take a specific
melody and hand back a score.** Josh's instinct was right, and the brief undersold why.
The open field moved too, and there it moved *toward* us: three components the brief does not have
are live, licence-clean, small enough for the box, and aimed at exactly the two clauses that are
still unanswered.
---
Every claim below carries one of two marks, matching STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §1.
source was NOT fetched this pass. It may be true. It is not evidence yet.
No claim below is marked VERIFIED on the strength of a search-result snippet. Nothing here has
had its licence body pinned to docs/licence_records/; that is the step BEFORE any of it renders a
byte or takes a payment.
---
Recorded so no later reader re-litigates it.
anything found this pass. Every engine checked, including the three that did not exist in the
brief's sources, decomposes into those four layers.
STEPBACK_COMMERCIAL_ENGINES.md §3.6 is accurate to thelegal page today — VERIFIED by re-fetch of https://www.aiva.ai/legal/1.** Free/Standard are a
Non-Commercial License; Pro is a "Limited Commercial License" to monetise "on a limited set of
third-party websites: Youtube, Twitch, Tik Tok and Instagram"; a Full Copyright License exists and
reads *"Licensor hereby assigns, grants and conveys all copyrights of the MIDI and/or Audio
Composition to Licensee"*; and the training prohibition is real and tier-wide — *"Licensee is not
permitted to use the Audio and/or MIDI Composition, or any audio sample as part of a training
dataset for any Machine Learning, Deep Learning or statistical algorithm."* **The doc read the page
correctly. §3 below shows the page is not the whole story.**
CC-BY-4.0 weights, the 128-dim multihot per-frame MIDI conditioning quoted verbatim in the brief,
~71k h of mostly-instrumental stock music, 2.4B/230M. **The technical report is still forthcoming
and there are still no published evaluation metrics.** The brief's "unknown, and that is the honest
word" verdict stands at HEAD.
still 1.5 XL (4B DiT), 2026-04-02. There is no ACE-Step 2. There is still **no MIDI or melody
input of any kind**; the audio-side conditioning surface (reference audio, cover, repaint/edit,
Vocal2BGM) is exactly as the brief lists it. Code MIT; **the weights licence is still not declared
in the repo — VERIFIED absent**, which matters more now than when it was written, because the brief
leans on ACE-Step as a refiner arm.
that lineage was, if anything, understated — §3.2 below.
is untouched by anything in the field. No new component makes it stop being rung one.
pass is free, and two of the three are small enough to run alongside the existing arms.
---
STEPBACK_COMMERCIAL_ENGINES.md §3.2, the AIVA conditioning surface. It undersells AIVA, and the correction favours Josh's floor.The doc's §3.2 describes AIVA's conditioning as preset styles, INFLUENCE ("the user uploads a MIDI
file, typically a chord progression, and AIVA analyses the harmonic structure and writes a new piece
over that structure with its own melody"), Style Designer, and explicit parameters.
**The official user manual, fetched this pass, lists four generation modes and the doc has only
one of them — VERIFIED** (https://aiva.crisp.help/en/article/general-user-manual-44klp4/):
an instrument into a full composition."*
**"Turn a specific melody into a full composition" is the composed-never-prompted primitive stated as
a shipping product feature, and no sibling document has it.** The doc's §3.2 conclusion — that
AIVA's Influence pattern is "the precedent that keeps Josh's authorship intact" — was right by
accident and for the weaker of the two available reasons. Influence is a style-transfer surface that
writes its own melody. Step by Step is the one that takes OUR tune.
Two supporting corrections from the same read, both VERIFIED:
of 60 seconds**. The doc's practitioner-sourced claim that "MIDI influences work well and audio
influences work badly" is a secondary read; the vendor documents both paths with hard minimums and
a quality note, and does not deprecate either.
automation curves**, per-track filtering, reverb, delay, Auto Staccato, section insert/delete, BPM
change, and a pattern-based percussion editor with adjustable resolution. **Dynamics automation
curves are the exact thing our own renderer does not emit** (STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §5.1's "one
dynamic layer a note"). AIVA ships an expression layer as a first-class editable surface. That is
a benchmark observation, not just a feature list.
STEPBACK_COMMERCIAL_ENGINES.md §4 treats Suno and Udio as a matched pair. Udio is no longer a supply route at all.Music Business Worldwide: the new subscription platform launches "in 2026" and the existing product
runs with "creations controlled within a walled garden and the service amended in multiple ways —
including fingerprinting, filtering, and other measures."
of August 2026 the licensed platform has not shipped — LANE-REPORTED** (Billboard FAQ, RouteNote,
Chartlex, Undetectr; no primary Udio terms page fetched this pass).
Consequence for the brief: Udio is not a candidate, not a comparator and not a fallback. A model
you cannot export from cannot score a game. The §4 pairing should read "Suno, and Udio as a cautionary
tale about platform risk in this category," because the same walled-garden pressure is being applied
to Suno by the same rights-holders — LANE-REPORTED (MBW, "Universal and Suno are in a PR battle over
'walled gardens'").
VERIFIED by direct fetch of https://suno.com/terms, Last Updated 2026-03-26:
of its right, title and interest in and to any Output owned by Suno and generated from Submissions
made by you."* Free and Basic tiers are *"solely for your lawful, internal, personal and
non-commercial purposes."*
Output or Voice Model) to create, develop or improve any competing products or services or to
power, enable or train other artificial intelligence and machine learning models, tools or
technologies."*
Two consequences, and they pull in opposite directions:
legal page's own reading. That is an uncomfortable fact and it belongs in the benchmark.
anything local. Any plan that quietly assumed "generate a corpus, train our own" is closed by both
vendors, in writing, at every tier.
"Where's V6?"; and the July-2026 Alibaba paper's leaderboard names "Suno V5.5" as the current
comparator, which is VERIFIED corroboration from a primary source).
STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §3.1's "exactly one open, permissively-licensed symbolic model implements the primitive we need."The brief already corrected this from one to two (adding Composer's Assistant 2). **It is at least
three, and the third is the one built for the job we actually have.** See §4.1 — SymphonyGen.
STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §4's "the best conditioning surface ever built for this exact problem (JASCO) is licence-refused... anyone re-running this survey will re-discover that."The finding is still true about JASCO. The conclusion drawn from it is now avoidable, because a
melody-conditioning adapter exists for a backbone whose licence we already accept — see §4.2,
MuseControlLite over Stable Audio Open. The open field's quality frontier and usable frontier are
closer together than the doc says.
STEPBACK_COMMERCIAL_ENGINES.md §1.4 and §6, the delivery layer, cites Wwise 201 course pages and blog posts and nothing since.Not wrong, and not structure-changing, but not current:
what's-new blog returned HTTP 403 on fetch this pass; the release exists per search indexing and
the Audiokinetic May-2026 highlights post). The doc's mechanisms — vertical layering, horizontal
re-sequencing, stingers, playlist transitions — are unchanged fundamentals.
DSP graph in the engine is a third delivery option beside Wwise and FMOD, and it is the one that
costs nothing and ships with the renderer. It belongs in §6 as a row.
into middleware**, not AI generation as a royalty-free track vending machine — LANE-REPORTED. That
is the brief's "build the delivery layer regardless of which generator wins" recommendation being
independently confirmed by practice, which is a strengthening, not a change.
STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §5.2 offers exactly two sampled rungs: the CC0 incumbent and BBC SO
Discover. A third free pro-grade library exists: Orchestral Tools' Berlin Free Orchestra —
LANE-REPORTED: drawn from the flagship Berlin series, 20 solo instruments and 13 ensembles, 67
articulations, four legato soloists, **round robins and multiple dynamic layers on strings and
brass, running in the free SINE player. The multiple-dynamic-layers claim is the interesting one**,
because Discover is documented as one dynamic layer per articulation on many patches — Berlin Free
may be a better test bed for the expression-emission work than Discover is.
Its licence was NOT verified this pass — the Orchestral Tools product page fetch returned
navigation only, and the EULA is at a separate /legal/license-agreement path. **That read is
outstanding and it is a blocker on using it**, exactly as the Spitfire EULA was before the brief read
it. Do not let a lane treat "widely listed as commercial-use-allowed" as clearance.
---
VERIFIED by direct fetch of https://huggingface.co/SymphonyGen/SymphonyGen, with the paper at
https://arxiv.org/html/2604.25498v1:
decomposes symphonic scores along Bar, Track and Event axes with a cascading decoder.
skeleton", and the skeleton may be user-written MIDI. It also does re-orchestration** by
analysing the harmony skeleton out of an existing MIDI file. The paper is described as a
melody-aware controllable re-orchestration model that preserves melodic movement and ornament
— LANE-REPORTED for that phrasing, VERIFIED for the skeleton-conditioning mechanism.
hf download SymphonyGen/SymphonyGen).generative component in the brief. It fits beside everything already running.
45,632 "contemporary" MIDI files.** The contemporary half carries the same unresolved question as
AMT's Lakh provenance. For a shipped commercial game that is an outstanding read, not a clearance.
Why this matters more than its size suggests. The brief's Option A stage 3 has one component,
Composer's Assistant 2, doing one job: infilling inner voices and counter-lines inside bars our code
fixed. SymphonyGen does a different job that the brief has nobody for — orchestration. It takes a
skeleton and decides which instruments carry which line, which is the layer between "we have notes"
and "we have a score worth rendering." Round 3's grade ("never any harmonies added on") and round 4's
("no variation or changes or movement") are two different missing layers, and the brief assigns both
to one model that was built for the first.
These are complements, not rivals. CA2 infills; SymphonyGen orchestrates and re-orchestrates. The
re-orchestration path is also the cheapest possible movement mechanism: the same skeleton, orchestrated
three ways, is vertical re-orchestration in the Wwise sense — produced symbolically, before any
renderer runs.
LANE-REPORTED (arXiv 2506.18729, ICML 2025; repo https://github.com/fundwotsai2001/MuseControlLite;
the repo LICENSE file was not fetched this pass and that read is outstanding):
stable-audio-open-1.0 supporting **melody, dynamics, rhythm andaudio conditioning (inpainting/outpainting), combinable in any arrangement.**
control accuracy from 56.6% to 61.1% with 6.75× fewer trainable parameters than the SOTA fine-tuning
mechanism it compares against.
melody accuracy.
Why it matters: STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §4.1 calls the JASCO/MusicGen-melody refusal "the
painful one" — the best melody-conditioning surface ever built, foreclosed by a CC-BY-NC weights
term. MuseControlLite is the same primitive **on the one audio backbone in the entire survey with the
cleanest declared training-data provenance** (Stable Audio Open 1.0: 472,618 Freesound + 13,874 FMA,
all CC0/CC-BY/CC-Sampling+, Audible Magic screened — the open-stack doc's own VERIFIED read). If both
licences clear, that combination is the only melody-conditioned neural audio path in the field where
we could answer a provenance challenge with a document rather than a shrug.
Caveats stated honestly. 61.1% melody control accuracy is not "it plays our tune"; it is "it
mostly follows our tune." Stable Audio Open 1.0 is capped at 47 seconds and the open-stack doc
already rates it weak on instrumental music. This is a conditioning-surface finding, not a
quality-ceiling finding.
The brief has Symphony Rendering (ICASSP 2026) as the sole licence-clean neural realiser. Two
siblings surfaced:
for coarse expressive direction plus MIDI score for note-precise control.** Demonstrated on piano,
guitar, violin, saxophone and orchestral instruments. It reports beating **MusicGen-Melody,
Coco-Mulla and MIDI-DDSP** on FAD and CLAP, chroma similarity ~0.76–0.79, and the highest MOS across
text alignment, score alignment, expressivity and musicianship. **Weights and licence are NOT stated
in the paper — VERIFIED absent.** Demo page only.
performance synthesis. Piano only. LANE-REPORTED. Listed for completeness; the wrong instrument
family for us.
The class-level finding: "text for the feel, MIDI for the notes" is now the standard conditioning
shape in expressive rendering, and it is exactly Magenta RT 2's shape (12 MusicCoCa style tokens +
128-dim per-frame MIDI). The brief bet on the right primitive. **What it does not have is a
licence-clean member of the class with released weights** — Symphony Rendering, RenderBox and
MIDI-VALLE are all research artifacts with unstated or unfetched terms, and Magenta RT 2 is the only
one with a licence you can read and weights you can download. That materially strengthens Magenta
RT 2's position relative to the brief's own hedging.
VERIFIED by fetch of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.18968 — *Audio-to-Audio via Diffusion Warm
Initialization*, Cristóbal Andrade and Sebastian J. Schlecht, 2026-06-18. Instead of starting the
reverse diffusion from pure noise, it initialises from a partially denoised version of the input
audio, accelerating convergence while holding quality; demonstrated on timbre transfer and audio
enhancement.
STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §9 PIPELINE C ("composed score → rough render → audio-to-audio at a swept
strength") is exactly this technique, and it now has a 2026 primary citation and a named parameter
regime instead of only the init_noise_level sweep. **This does not change the pipeline; it means the
sweep has a literature to sweep against instead of starting blind.**
This is the sweep's most decision-relevant negative result. **Four engines that did not exist in the
sibling docs' sources were checked against the one question that can disqualify: can it be given OUR
tune?**
updated March 2026; Lyria 3 Pro on Vertex AI from 2026-03-25 per Google Cloud's blog —
LANE-REPORTED). Inputs: "Text". Outputs: "Audio (music), text (lyrics)". Latent diffusion on
temporal audio latents. No audio, melody or MIDI conditioning documented at all. Every output
carries SynthID watermarking — VERIFIED, and that is a second, separate consideration for a
shipped soundtrack that no sibling doc has had to weigh. Lyria 3 Pro reaches three-minute
compositions with structural control (intro/verse/chorus/bridge) — LANE-REPORTED. **DISQUALIFIED on
the melody column.**
Inputs: **text prompt, plus an Audio Reference upload of roughly 30 seconds max "to guide the style
and sound." No MIDI, no melody file, no composition-plan input documented.** 3 s to 5 min output,
MP3 and WAV. The vendor's own claim: music *"cleared for nearly all commercial uses, from film and
television to podcasts and social media videos, and from advertisements to gaming."* The Music
Marketplace (2026-03-19 — VERIFIED) names game developers explicitly and sells three licence tiers
(Social Media, Paid Marketing, Offline). Training data is licensed — deals with Merlin and
Kobalt with revenue sharing — LANE-REPORTED. **The music-terms page (last updated 2026-05-26 —
VERIFIED) defers the actual grant to a separate "Eleven Music Model-Specific Terms" document that
was not fetched this pass. DISQUALIFIED on the melody column — but it is the licence-cleanest
commercial engine found, and if a bed-tier need ever outranks authorship it is the one to look at.**
full commercial rights and API access; MiniMax Music 2.6 released 2026-04-10 with WAV export and an
AI Cover mode. Both are text/lyrics-and-tags engines. DISQUALIFIED on the melody column on the
evidence available; neither vendor's terms were fetched.
(arXiv 2607.20253v2, Alibaba Token Foundry, 2026-07-23). Their 8B hierarchical-planner +
8B flow-matching-renderer system scores Elo 1,129, official rank range 2–3 on the Artificial
Analysis "Music with Vocals" leaderboard, and names its peers: **Suno V5.5, Mureka V8, Lyria 3 Pro,
MiniMax Music 2.6. No weights or code released.** Notably, its melody handling for cover
generation works by extracting melody tokens via source separation and pitch estimation from
reference audio — i.e. even the frontier system reaches our primitive through an audio round trip,
not a score port.
The finding this section produces, and it is the sweep's answer to Josh's question. Between the
sibling docs' sources and today, the commercial field consolidated around **licensed training data,
watermarking, walled gardens and text prompts**. Not one of the four new entrants accepts a supplied
melody. Udio, which was a candidate, stopped letting anyone export at all.
**AIVA remains the only commercial engine in the field that takes a specific melody and returns an
editable score.** The floor Josh named is not merely still standing — the sweep found no second
occupant of its category.
---
The first column is the one that can disqualify. Read it before anything else.
| Engine | Version / date | Can it be given OUR tune? | Commercial grant for a shipped game | Provenance & platform risk | Verdict for the benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIVA *(Josh's floor)* | live; manual dated Sept 2025 | YES — the only YES in this table. "Step by Step" mode: *"turn a specific melody, an accompaniment, percussion rhythm or even an instrument into a full composition"* — VERIFIED. Plus From-Chord-Progression, plus MIDI Influence (≥8 bars) | CONTRADICTORY — resolve before spending. See §5.3. Legal page: Pro = limited licence, four social platforms only. Pricing page: Pro = "Copyright owned by YOU", "Full monetization" | Symbolic corpus, classical masters. No litigation found. Training prohibition on output — VERIFIED. Cloud dependency; no local option | BENCHMARK IT. It is the category of one. Its own renderer is not the product — MIDI export into our render chain is |
| Suno | V5 / V5.5; terms updated 2026-03-26 | NO — text/lyrics/audio-upload; no score port | Strong on paper — VERIFIED: Pro/Premier get *"assigns to you all of its right, title and interest in and to any Output"*. Free/Basic non-commercial | 60,000+ fingerprinted recordings in litigation; Warner settled, Sony/UMG continuing. Same tier-wide training prohibition — VERIFIED. V6 promised for 2026, not shipped | Reference only. Disqualified on melody |
| Udio | walled garden since Oct 2025 | NO | NONE — you cannot export. Downloads, stems and video disabled; licensed platform unlaunched as of Aug 2026 — LANE-REPORTED | UMG/Warner/Merlin/Kobalt deals; fingerprinting and filtering in the live product | REMOVE from the candidate set. Carry only as the platform-risk cautionary row |
| Google Lyria 3 / 3 Pro | 3: 2026-02-18; Pro: 2026-03-25 | NO — VERIFIED. Input: "Text." Nothing else | Gemini API / Vertex AI, paid preview. Model card does not address output ownership — VERIFIED | SynthID watermark on every output — VERIFIED. Training data undisclosed | Disqualified on melody. The watermark is a second, independent reason to keep it out of a shipped soundtrack |
| ElevenLabs Music v2 | Marketplace 2026-03-19 | NO — text prompt + ~30 s audio style reference — VERIFIED | Vendor claims cleared "from advertisements to gaming"; three marketplace licence tiers; actual grant lives in un-fetched Model-Specific Terms | Licensed training data (Merlin, Kobalt, revenue share) — LANE-REPORTED. The cleanest provenance story of any commercial engine here | Disqualified on melody. Keep as the named fallback if a bed-tier need ever outranks authorship |
| Mureka V8/V9 · MiniMax Music 2.6 | 2026 | NO — LANE-REPORTED | Mureka: paid plans claim full commercial rights, from ~$10/mo — LANE-REPORTED | unverified | Out. No terms fetched, no melody port |
| Component | Job in the stack | Melody conditioning | Licence | Fits 32 GB | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Composer's Assistant 2 | infill inner voices, counter-lines, accompaniment in bars our code fixed | EXACT — empty MIDI items say where to write; our theme is context, never a target | MIT code; PD + permissively-licensed MIDI training only — the best provenance of any generative component in any doc | trivially | brief's stage-3 pick — unchanged and still right for infill |
| SymphonyGen — NEW | orchestration and re-orchestration — the layer between "we have notes" and "a score worth rendering" | YES — beat-quantized multi-voice harmony skeleton, user-written MIDI accepted; re-orchestrates from existing MIDI | MIT, weights downloadable — VERIFIED | 87M + 124M — smaller than everything else here | ADD to stage 3 beside CA2. Different job, not a rival. Provenance read outstanding on the 45,632 "contemporary" MIDI files |
| Anticipatory Music Transformer | infill / accompaniment | EXACT | Apache-2.0 code; weights licence unstated; Lakh provenance question | trivially | unchanged — CA2 is preferred |
| Magenta RealTime 2 | neural realiser taking notes directly | DIRECT, frame-wise — 128-dim multihot MIDI + 12 style tokens | Apache-2.0 + CC-BY-4.0, no revenue threshold, no second chain — re-VERIFIED | ~5 GB at bf16 | unchanged. Position strengthened: it is still the only member of its class with readable terms and downloadable weights (§4.3). JAX-on-sm_120 still unproven |
| Stable Audio 3 Medium | audio-to-audio refiner over our rough render | TUNABLE via init_audio + init_noise_level | Stability Community (<$1M rev) + Gemma chain | 1.69–6.52 GB | unchanged |
| MuseControlLite — NEW | melody-conditioned generation on a licence-clean backbone | YES — melody, dynamics, rhythm and audio conditioning, combinable; 61.1% melody control accuracy | repo LICENSE not fetched — OUTSTANDING. Backbone is Stable Audio Open 1.0, the cleanest declared training provenance in the survey | 85M trainable adapter | ADD to the probe list. It is the answer to the JASCO refusal that §3.5 said had none. 47 s cap is real |
| ACE-Step 1.5 XL | audio-to-audio refiner | indirect only — no MIDI, re-VERIFIED | MIT code; weights licence still undeclared — VERIFIED absent | ≥24 GB for best tier | unchanged, and the undeclared weights term is now a named debt |
| RenderBox — NEW | expressive performance rendering, multi-instrument | YES — text (coarse) + MIDI score (note-precise) | not stated in the paper — VERIFIED absent. Demo page only | unknown | WATCH, do not plan on it. Beats MusicGen-Melody / Coco-Mulla / MIDI-DDSP on FAD, CLAP and MOS. If weights land under a usable licence it outranks Symphony Rendering |
| Audio-to-Audio via Diffusion Warm Init — NEW | the method behind Pipeline C's strength sweep | n/a (technique) | paper, 2026-06-18 | n/a | CITE IT. Pipeline C now has a literature instead of a blind sweep |
| sfizz + VSCO 2 CE / VCSL | fast preview renderer | EXACT | CC0, unconditional | 0 | unchanged — preview only, never final |
| Spitfire BBC SO Discover | free pro-grade sampled orchestra | EXACT | EULA read; grant fires; §10 forbids AI training | 0 | unchanged |
| Berlin Free Orchestra — NEW | second free pro-grade rung | EXACT | EULA NOT read — BLOCKER. /legal/license-agreement fetch outstanding | 0 | Round robins and multiple dynamic layers on strings and brass (LANE-REPORTED) make it the better test bed for the expression-emission work than Discover. Read the EULA before a byte renders |
AIVA's own two pages contradict each other, and both were fetched this pass.
*"on a limited set of third-party websites: Youtube, Twitch, Tik Tok and Instagram."* A game is not
one of them. The Full Copyright License exists as a separate grant. VERIFIED.
YOU" and "Full monetization"** without restriction, 300 downloads/month, all file formats
including WAV. Free and Standard both state "Copyright owned by AIVA". VERIFIED.
Free, Standard Monthly, Standard Annually, Pro Monthly and Pro Annually plans"*, while an
**Enterprise is defined as "a business with 3 or more employees AND that generated more than $300k
of revenues in the past year" — VERIFIED.** A solo developer does not obviously qualify for the
tier STEPBACK_COMMERCIAL_ENGINES.md §3.6 concluded he would need.
**So the sibling doc's conclusion — "shipping AIVA output in a commercial game requires the
Enterprise tier" — is the pessimistic reading of a genuine ambiguity, not a settled fact, and the
optimistic reading may be the vendor's actual intent.** Our own licence discipline
(fetch_sfz_stack.py: store the body verbatim, never the summary) says this is resolved by **one
email to contact@aiva.ai asking for the Pro-tier game-shipping grant in writing**, and the reply
pinned to docs/licence_records/aiva/ alongside both page bodies. **That costs nothing, it is not a
purchase, and it is the cheapest possible de-risking of the benchmark.** Do it before the benchmark
generates its first track, so the result is actionable whichever way it lands.
---
The brief's structure survives the sweep. The four-layer frame, Option A, the proof-cost ordering
with the symbolic-infill proof pulled into wave one, the zero-capex DawDreamer host, the
timbre_critic wiring, the delivery layer built regardless of generator, and the CC0-sfz chain
retired to preview duty — none of it is contradicted by anything found this pass, and two parts of it
are independently corroborated (the delivery-layer recommendation by 2026 industry practice; Magenta
RT 2's position by the discovery that its whole class lacks a licence-clean alternative).
Three amendments WITHIN that structure, none of which reorder the stages:
and re-orchestrates**, and that is a layer the brief has nobody for. It is MIT, its weights are
downloadable, and it is the smallest model in the stack. Its re-orchestration path is also the
cheapest movement mechanism available — one skeleton, three orchestrations, which is vertical
re-orchestration produced symbolically before any renderer runs.
licence-refused and that is that" is no longer the end of the sentence.
bed for the expression-emission work than BBC SO Discover, because it is reported to ship round
robins and multiple dynamic layers — the exact thing our renderer is not currently exercising. **Its
EULA has not been read and that read gates its use.**
And one item that is not an amendment to the structure but is the sweep's operational finding:
resolve the AIVA licence contradiction in writing before the benchmark runs (§5.3).
---
claim is somebody else's metric.
LICENSE, the Orchestral Tools Berlin Free Orchestra EULA, the ElevenLabs "Eleven Music
Model-Specific Terms", and the AIVA Pro-tier game-shipping clarification. **None of these components
may render a byte or take a payment before its body is pinned to docs/licence_records/.**
45,632 "contemporary" MIDI files of unstated origin. For a shipped commercial game that is a read,
not a clearance.
documented input surfaces; an undocumented API parameter could exist. The documented surface is what
we can plan against.
therefore LANE-REPORTED. It does not affect the recommendation, which turns on mechanisms that have
not changed since the doc's sources.
from a primary research paper that reports its own placement on it. Treat rank ordering as
directional.
---
Fetched directly this pass (2026-08-09) — VERIFIED:
Search-indexed only — LANE-REPORTED:
Our own tree, read at HEAD:
docs/proposals/music/MUSIC_ARCHITECTURE_DECISION_BRIEF.md (revision 2)docs/proposals/music/STEPBACK_COMMERCIAL_ENGINES.mddocs/proposals/music/STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md---
Ordered by Josh's standing floor law (2026-08-01, cross-project): his suggestions are the floor and
the loop is required to expand, check and find the gaps. The AIVA suggestion was treated as the floor
and tested against the field rather than accepted or replaced. Every candidate was asked the one
question STEPBACK_OPEN_STACK.md §0 makes the first disqualifying column — *can it be given OUR
tune?* — because that is the composed-never-prompted ruling stated as an engineering requirement.
Licence reads are face-value per memory license-reads-not-conservative-solo-dev-tooling, with
explicit triggered prohibitions named and nothing else inferred. Provenance is treated as a CVD §17.1
care question as well as a legal one. Nothing here was installed, purchased or adopted, per
proof-before-spend.