In this paper, we study a novel task that learns to compose music from natural language. Given the lyrics as input, we propose a melody composition model that generates lyrics-conditional melody as well as the exact alignment between the generated melody and the given lyrics simultaneously. More specifically, we develop the melody composition model based on the sequence-to-sequence framework. It consists of two neural encoders to encode the current lyrics and the context melody respectively, and a hierarchical decoder to jointly produce musical notes and the corresponding alignment. Experimental results on lyrics-melody pairs of 18,451 pop songs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. In addition, we apply a singing voice synthesizer software to synthesize the "singing" of the lyrics and melodies for human evaluation. Results indicate that our generated melodies are more melodious and tuneful compared with the baseline method.
A variety of music composition works have been done over the last decades. Most of the traditional methods compose music based on music theory and expert domain knowledge. chan2006improving design rules from music theory to use music clips to stitch them together in a reasonable way. With the development of machine learning and the increase of public music data, data-driven methods such as Markov chains model @cite_8 and graphic model @cite_5 have been introduced to compose music. Recently, deep learning has been revealed the potentials for musical creation. Most of these deep learning approaches use the recurrent neural network (RNN) to compose the music by regarding as a sequence. The MelodyRNN @cite_17 model, proposed by Google Brain Team, uses looking back RNN and attention RNN to capture the long-term dependency of melody. chu2016song propose a hierarchical RNN based model which additionally incorporates knowledge from music theory into the representation to compose not only the melody but also the drums and chords. Some recent works have also started exploring various generative adversarial networks (GAN) models to compose music @cite_13 @cite_15 @cite_21 . brunner2018midi design recurrent variational autoencoders (VAEs) with a hierarchical decoder to reproduce short musical sequences.
@cite_8 @cite_21 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_17
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Most existing neural network models for music generation use recurrent neural networks. However, the recent WaveNet model proposed by DeepMind shows that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can also generate realistic musical waveforms in the audio domain. Following this light, we investigate using CNNs for generating melody (a series of MIDI notes) one bar after another in the symbolic domain. In addition to the generator, we use a discriminator to learn the distributions of melodies, making it a generative adversarial network (GAN). Moreover, we propose a novel conditional mechanism to exploit available prior knowledge, so that the model can generate melodies either from scratch, by following a chord sequence, or by conditioning on the melody of previous bars (e.g. a priming melody), among other possibilities. The resulting model, named MidiNet, can be expanded to generate music with multiple MIDI channels (i.e. tracks). We conduct a user study to compare the melody of eight-bar long generated by MidiNet and by Google's MelodyRNN models, each time using the same priming melody. Result shows that MidiNet performs comparably with MelodyRNN models in being realistic and pleasant to listen to, yet MidiNet's melodies are reported to be much more interesting. In this paper, we introduce new methods and discuss results of text-based LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks for automatic music composition. The proposed network is designed to learn relationships within text documents that represent chord progressions and drum tracks in two case studies. In the experiments, word-RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) show good results for both cases, while character-based RNNs (char-RNNs) only succeed to learn chord progressions. The proposed system can be used for fully automatic composition or as semi-automatic systems that help humans to compose music by controlling a diversity parameter of the model. We consider the problem of extracting essential ingredients of music signals, such as a well-defined global temporal structure in the form of nested periodicities (or meter). We investigate whether we can construct an adaptive signal processing device that learns by example how to generate new instances of a given musical style. Because recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can, in principle, learn the temporal structure of a signal, they are good candidates for such a task. Unfortunately, music composed by standard RNNs often lacks global coherence. The reason for this failure seems to be that RNNs cannot keep track of temporally distant events that indicate global music structure. Long short-term memory (LSTM) has succeeded in similar domains where other RNNs have failed, such as timing and counting and the learning of context sensitive languages. We show that LSTM is also a good mechanism for learning to compose music. We present experimental results showing that LSTM successfully learns a form of blues music and is able to compose novel (and we believe pleasing) melodies in that style. Remarkably, once the network has found the relevant structure, it does not drift from it: LSTM is able to play the blues with good timing and proper structure as long as one is willing to listen. A big challenge in algorithmic composition is to devise a model that is both easily trainable and able to reproduce the long-range temporal dependencies typical of music. Here we investigate how artificial neural networks can be trained on a large corpus of melodies and turned into automated mu- sic composers able to generate new melodies coherent with the style they have been trained on. We employ gated-recurrent unit (GRU) networks that have been shown to be particularly efficient in learning complex sequential activations with arbitrary long time lags. Our model processes rhythm and melody in parallel while modeling the relation between these two properties. Using such an approach, we were able to generate interesting complete melodies or suggest possible continuations of a melody fragment that is coherent with the characteristics of the fragment itself.