Existing research on music generation focuses on composition, but often ignores the expressive performance characteristics required for plausible renditions of resultant pieces. In this paper, we introduce the Nintendo Entertainment System Music Database (NES-MDB), a large corpus allowing for separate examination of the tasks of composition and performance. NES-MDB contains thousands of multi-instrumental songs composed for playback by the compositionally-constrained NES audio synthesizer. For each song, the dataset contains a musical score for four instrument voices as well as expressive attributes for the dynamics and timbre of each voice. Unlike datasets comprised of General MIDI files, NES-MDB includes all of the information needed to render exact acoustic performances of the original compositions. Alongside the dataset, we provide a tool that renders generated compositions as NES-style audio by emulating the device's audio processor. Additionally, we establish baselines for the tasks of composition, which consists of learning the semantics of composing for the NES synthesizer, and performance, which involves finding a mapping between a composition and realistic expressive attributes.
While most of the early research in algorithmic music composition focused on expert systems @cite_17 , statistical approaches have since become the predominant approach. Mozer (1994) trained RNNs on monophonic melodies using a formulation similar to eq:mono , finding the composed results to compare favorably to those from a trigram model. Others have also explored monophonic melody generation with RNNs @cite_11 @cite_25 . Boulanger- (2012) standardize the polyphonic prediction task for blended scores ( eq:blend ), measuring performance of a multitude of classical baselines against RNNs @cite_5 , restricted Boltzmann machines @cite_4 , and NADEs @cite_19 on polyphonic music datasets. Several papers @cite_10 @cite_13 @cite_31 directly compare to their results. Statistical models of music have also been employed as symbolic priors to assist music transcription algorithms @cite_0 @cite_1 @cite_3 .
@cite_13 @cite_4 @cite_1 @cite_17 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_10 @cite_25 @cite_11
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We introduce a dataset for facilitating audio-visual analysis of music performances. The dataset comprises 44 simple multi-instrument classical music pieces assembled from coordinated but separately recorded performances of individual tracks. For each piece, we provide the musical score in MIDI format, the audio recordings of the individual tracks, the audio and video recording of the assembled mixture, and ground-truth annotation files including frame-level and note-level transcriptions. We describe our methodology for the creation of the dataset, particularly highlighting our approaches to address the challenges involved in maintaining synchronization and expressiveness. We demonstrate the high quality of synchronization achieved with our proposed approach by comparing the dataset with existing widely used music audio datasets. We anticipate that the dataset will be useful for the development and evaluation of existing music information retrieval (MIR) tasks, as well as for novel multimodal tasks. We benchmark two existing MIR tasks (multipitch analysis and score-informed source separation) on the dataset and compare them with other existing music audio datasets. In addition, we consider two novel multimodal MIR tasks (visually informed multipitch analysis and polyphonic vibrato analysis) enabled by the dataset and provide evaluation measurements and baseline systems for future comparisons (from our recent work). Finally, we propose several emerging research directions that the dataset enables. This paper proposes a Bayesian approach for automatic music transcription of polyphonic MIDI signals based on generative modeling of onset occurrences of musical notes. Automatic music transcription involves two subproblems that are interdependent of each other: rhythm recognition and tempo estimation. When we listen to music, we are able to recognize its rhythm and tempo (or beat location) fairly easily even though there is ambiguity in determining the individual note values and tempo. This may be made possible through our empirical knowledge about rhythm patterns and tempo variations that possibly occur in music. To automate the process of recognizing the rhythm and tempo of music, we propose modeling the generative process of a MIDI signal of polyphonic music by combining the sub-process by which a musically natural tempo curve is generated and the sub-process by which a set of note onset positions is generated based on a 2-dimensional rhythm tree structure representation of music, and develop a parameter inference algorithm for the proposed model. We show some of the transcription results obtained with the present method. Our goal is to be able to build a generative model from a deep neural network architecture to try to create music that has both harmony and melody and is passable as music composed by humans. Previous work in music generation has mainly been focused on creating a single melody. More recent work on polyphonic music modeling, centered around time series probability density estimation, has met some partial success. In particular, there has been a lot of work based off of Recurrent Neural Networks combined with Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RNN-RBM) and other similar recurrent energy based models. Our approach, however, is to perform end-to-end learning and generation with deep neural nets alone. Central to the field of MIR research is the evaluation of algorithms used to extract information from music data. We present mir_eval, an open source software library which provides a transparent and easy-to-use implementation of the most common metrics used to measure the performance of MIR algorithms. In this paper, we enumerate the metrics implemented by mir_eval and quantitatively compare each to existing implementations. When the scores reported by mir_eval differ substantially from the reference, we detail the differences in implementation. We also provide a brief overview of mir_eval’s architecture, design, and intended use. 1. EVALUATING MIR ALGORITHMS Much of the research in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) involves the development of systems that process raw music data to produce semantic information. The goal of these systems is frequently defined as attempting to duplicate the performance of a human listener given the same task [5]. A natural way to determine a system’s effectiveness might be for a human to study the output produced by the system and judge its correctness. However, this would yield only subjective ratings, and would also be extremely timeconsuming when evaluating a system’s output over a large corpus of music. Instead, objective metrics are developed to provide a well-defined way of computing a score which indicates each system’s output’s correctness. These metrics typically involve a heuristically-motivated comparison of the system’s output to a reference which is known to be correct. Over time, certain metrics have become standard for each ∗Please direct correspondence to craffel@gmail.com c © Colin Raffel, Brian McFee, Eric J. Humphrey, Justin Salamon, Oriol Nieto, Dawen Liang, Daniel P. W. Ellis. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Attribution: Colin Raffel, Brian McFee, Eric J. Humphrey, Justin Salamon, Oriol Nieto, Dawen Liang, Daniel P. W. Ellis.