# TimberAgent: Gram-Guided Retrieval for Executable Music Effect Control

Source: [TimberAgent: Gram-Guided Retrieval for Executable Music Effect Control](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/69b0f7262d603e6de3e45ed9>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-03-12T05:00:04.726Z

Authors: Shihao He, Yihan Xia, Fang Liu, Taotao Wang, Shengli Zhang

Published: 2026-03-10T08:09:32.000Z

## Abstract

Digital audio workstations expose rich effect chains, yet a semantic gap remains between perceptual user intent and low-level signal-processing parameters. We study retrieval-grounded audio effect control, where the output is an editable plugin configuration rather than a finalized waveform. Our focus is Texture Resonance Retrieval (TRR), an audio representation built from Gram matrices of projected mid-level Wav2Vec2 activations. This design preserves texture-relevant co-activation structure. We evaluate TRR on a guitar-effects benchmark with 1,063 candidate presets and 204 queries. The evaluation follows Protocol-A, a cross-validation scheme that prevents train-test leakage. We compare TRR against CLAP and internal retrieval baselines (Wav2Vec-RAG, Text-RAG, FeatureNN-RAG), using min-max normalized metrics grounded in physical DSP parameter ranges. Ablation studies validate TRR's core design choices: projection dimensionality, layer selection, and projection type. A near-duplicate sensitivity analysis confirms that results are robust to trivial knowledge-base matches. TRR achieves the lowest normalized parameter error among evaluated methods. A multiple-stimulus listening study with 26 participants provides complementary perceptual evidence. We interpret these results as benchmark evidence that texture-aware retrieval is useful for editable audio effect control, while broader personalization and real-audio robustness claims remain outside the verified evidence presented here.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Audio Retrieval on Guitar-effects Protocol-A (Resolved-Audio-Grouped)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/audio-retrieval-on-guitar-effects-protocol-a-resolved-audio-grouped.md>): Audio Retrieval; Guitar-effects Protocol-A (Resolved-Audio-Grouped); L2 Distance: 8.0467.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09332>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09332.pdf>)