Mission

Music is real-time, interactive, and personal.

Daydream is a music research lab. We build models and experiences that embody the delight of making music.

Research

Audio models and musical control

Much in the same way that early LLMs struggled with math, audio diffusion does not adhere to musical rules. Musicians steer each other with chords, grooves, melodies, and unspoken cues. We train models to take those inputs directly and follow them in real time.

Live: Our real-time engine updates output sound within 100ms of a parameter change.
Additive: Each control is a small, modular add-on designed to steer any base model.
Musical: We’ve taught hallucination-prone models the language of music: chords, grooves, melodies, and more.

Fig. 1

SCORE

Sound Control & Orchestration Response Evaluation

SCORE is a standardized evaluation suite for measuring fine-grained parameter controllability, dynamic orchestration adherence, and multi-stem coordination in generative music models.

TaskScoreBaseOurs

Chords
Play the written chart
Root accuracy against the chart, from an independent chord recogniser · A shuffled chart scores 11%.
Base9%
Ours69%
Melody
Play the line it’s given
Pitch-class accuracy, frame by frame, from a pitch tracker · The best published result we tested scores 48%.
Base15%
Ours53%
Groove
Land on the reference hits
Accent F1 against the reference groove · The wrong groove scores 37%.
Base59%
Ours80%
Accompaniment
Play the missing bass part
Onset match to the real part it replaces · Our hardest task. A generic input scores 25%.
Base11%
Ours33%
Mix
Mix toward a human engineer
Share of songs where ours sits closer to the human mix than the rough does
Base—
Ours79%
Busyness
Follow the busyness dial
Share of commands where measured busyness moves the way the dial did
Base—
Ours100%

The engine

DEMON, our real-time audio engine, is open source. It answers a parameter change in under 100ms and takes control at 25 frames a second. Our models load into it as extensions.

DEMON on GitHub

Who

Music tech is for everyone

01
Pros
You produce in a DAW, for a living or for yourself.
Directorial control
You are in charge of chords, harmonization, feel, and instrumentation.
02
Makers
You have musical ideas and want to share them with the world.
Shape ideas into music
Real-time response and musical control let you shape an idea as you hear it.
03
Everyone
You love music in all its forms.
Music becomes play
You don’t need to be a musician to play. Interactive experiences combine listening and creation.