Ben Hayes, Haokun Tian, Stefan Lattner
Sound matching can be formulated as optimizing synthesizer parameters against an audio-domain objective. However, objectives derived from generic audio representations are often difficult to optimize, while direct search requires rendering every candidate. We introduce Synth-JEPA, which learns mutually predictive audio and parameter representations from paired synthesizer data. At inference, candidate parameters are scored directly in this learned space, yielding a renderer-free objective whose audio geometry is shaped by parameter correspondences rather than generic audio similarity. We evaluate Synth-JEPA on Surge XT using held-out synthesizer sounds and out-of-domain NSynth and FSD50K targets, against inverse models, direct search, and learned proxy objectives. Synth-JEPA outperforms all baselines in-domain and remains competitive out-of-domain. Its matching quality continues to improve with additional test-time search, allowing compute to be traded for match quality. In pairwise listening tests, listeners preferred Synth-JEPA in 85% of trials overall. Together, these results show that an audio representation with a parameter-induced geometry allows synthesizer sound matching to be approached as an effective renderer-free search problem.