Nicholas J. Bryan

Head of Music AI & Firefly Music

San Francisco

I am Head of Music AI/Firefly Music and a Principal Scientist at Adobe Research, where I lead the team behind Adobe Firefly Generate Music and the Firefly Music Model (now in Premiere Pro!). 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 acknowledgement. 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. I’ve also been a musician since childhood, performed at Carnegie Hall, and have been on the front-page of the New York Times.

Please visit his personal website for a complete list of publications and research topics.

Publications

DRAGON: Distributional Rewards Optimize Diffusion Generative Models

Bai, Yatong., Casebeer, Jonah., Sojoudi, Somayeh., Bryan, Nicholas. (Nov. 5, 2025)

Transactions on Machine Learning Research

Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation

Novack, Zachary., Zhu, Ge., Casebeer, Jonah., McAuley, Julian., Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor., Bryan, Nicholas. (Apr. 24, 2025)

(Spotlight, top 5%)

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)

DITTO-2: Distilled Diffusion Inference Time T-Optimization for Music Generation

Novack, Zachary., McAuley, Julian., Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor., Bryan, Nicholas. (Nov. 10, 2024)

International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR)

DITTO: Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation

Novack, Zachary., McAuley, Julian., Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor., Bryan, Nicholas. (Jul. 27, 2024)

(Oral, top 1.5%)

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

MusicHiFi: Fast High-Fidelity Stereo Vocoding

Zhu, Ge., Caceres, Juan-Pablo., Duan, Zhiyao., Bryan, Nicholas. (Jul. 23, 2024)

IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 31, pp. 2365-2369

Music ControlNet: Multiple Time-varying Controls for Music Generation

Wu, Shih-Lu., Donahue, Chris., Watanabe, Shinji., Bryan, Nicholas. (May. 24, 2024)

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP)

Meta-AF: Meta-Learning for Adaptive Filters

Casebeer, Jonah., Bryan, Nicholas., Smaragdis, Paris. (Nov. 23, 2022)

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP 2022)

Meta-learning for Adaptive Filters with Higher-order Frequency Dependencies

Wu, Junkai., Casebeer, Jonah., Bryan, Nicholas., Smaragdis, Paris. (Sep. 5, 2022)

IEEE International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement

Style Transfer of Audio Effects with Differentiable Signal Processing

Steinmetz, Christian., Bryan, Nicholas., Reiss, Joshua. (Sep. 1, 2022)

Journal of the Audio Engineering Society

Don’t Separate, Learn to Remix: End-to-End Neural Remixing with Joint Optimization

Yang, Haici., Firodiya, Shivani., Bryan, Nicholas., Kim, Minje. (May. 22, 2022)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing

Emotion Embedding Spaces for Matching Music to Stories

Won, Minz., Salamon, Justin., Bryan, Nicholas., Mysore, Gautham., Serra, Xavier. (Nov. 8, 2021)

Best Student Paper Award

International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR)

Deep Embeddings and Section Fusion Improve Music Segmentation

Salamon, Justin., Nieto, Oriol., Bryan, Nicholas. (Nov. 8, 2021)

International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR)

Auto-DSP: Learning to Optimize Acoustic Echo Cancellers

Casebeer, Jonah., Bryan, Nicholas., Smaragdis, Paris. (Oct. 18, 2021)

IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA)

Who Calls the Shots? Rethinking Few-Shot Learning for Audio

Wang, Yu., Bryan, Nicholas., Salamon, Justin., Cartwright, Mark., Bello, Juan. (Oct. 18, 2021)

Best Audio Few-Shot Learning Paper Award

IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA)

Neural Pitch-Shifting and Time-Stretching with Controllable LPCNet

Morrison, Max., Jin, Zeyu., Bryan, Nicholas., Caceres, Juan-Pablo., Pardo, Bryan. (Oct. 5, 2021)

Arxiv

Few-Shot Continual Learning for Audio Classification

Wang, Yu., Bryan, Nicholas., Cartwright, Mark., Bello, Juan., Salamon, Justin. (Jun. 8, 2021)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Differentiable Signal Processing with Black-Box Audio Effects

Ramírez, Marco., Wang, Oliver., Smaragdis, Paris., Bryan, Nicholas. (Jun. 6, 2021)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Context-Aware Prosody Correction for Text-Based Speech Editing

Morrison, Max., Rencker, Lucas., Jin, Zeyu., Bryan, Nicholas., Caceres, Juan-Pablo., Pardo, Bryan. (Jun. 6, 2021)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Controllable Neural Prosody Synthesis

Morrison, Maxwell., Jin, Zeyu., Salamon, Justin., Bryan, Nicholas., Mysore, Gautham. (Oct. 26, 2020)

Interspeech 2020

A Differentiable Perceptual Audio Metric Learned from Just Noticeable Differences

Manocha, Pranay., Finkelstein, Adam., Zhang, Richard., Bryan, Nicholas., Mysore, Gautham., Jin, Zeyu. (Oct. 26, 2020)

Interspeech 2020

Metric Learning vs Classification for Disentangled Music Representation Learning

Lee, Jongpil., Bryan, Nicholas., Salamon, Justin., Jin, Zeyu., Nam, Juhan. (Oct. 11, 2020)

International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR)

Few-Shot Drum Transcription in Polyphonic Music

Wang, Yu., Salamon, Justin., Cartwright, Mark., Bryan, Nicholas., Bello, Juan. (Oct. 11, 2020)

International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR)

One-Shot Parametric Audio Production Style Transfer With Application to Frequency Equalization

Mimilakis, Stylianos., Bryan, Nicholas., Smaragdis, Paris. (May. 4, 2020)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Disentangled Multidimensional Metric Learning For Music Similarity

Lee, Jongpil., Bryan, Nicholas., Salamon, Justin., Jin, Zeyu., Nam, Juhan. (May. 4, 2020)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Few-Shot Sound Event Detection

Wang, Yu., Salamon, Justin., Bryan, Nicholas., Bello, Juan. (May. 4, 2020)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Impulse Response Data Augmentation and Deep Neural Networks For Blind Room Acoustic Parameter Estimation

Bryan, Nicholas. (May. 4, 2020)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Scene-Aware Audio Rendering via Deep Acoustic Analysis

Tang, Zhenyu., Bryan, Nicholas., Li, Dingzeyu., Langlois, Tim., Manocha, Dinesh. (Mar. 23, 2020)

IEEE VR Journal Track (TVCG)

ISSE: An Interactive Source Separation Editor

Bryan, Nicholas., Mysore, Gautham., Wang, Ge. (Apr. 26, 2014)

ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

Source Separation of Polyphonic Music With Interactive User-Feedback on a Piano Roll Display

Bryan, Nicholas., Mysore, Gautham., Wang, Ge. (Nov. 4, 2013)

International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR)

An Efficient Posterior Regularized Latent Variable Model for Interactive Sound Source Separation

Bryan, Nicholas., Mysore, Gautham. (Jun. 16, 2013)

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

Interactive Refinement Of Supervised And Semi-Supervised Sound Source Separation Estimates

Bryan, Nicholas., Mysore, Gautham. (May. 1, 2013)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Clustering and Synchronizing Multi-camera Video via Landmark Cross-Correlation

Bryan, Nicholas., Smaragdis, Paris., Mysore, Gautham. (Mar. 25, 2012)

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

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