Music generation has generally been focused on either creating scores or interpreting them. We discuss differences between these two problems and propose that, in fact, it may be valuable to work in the space of direct performance generation: jointly predicting the notes and also their expressive timing and dynamics. We consider the significance and qualities of the dataset needed for this. Having identified both a problem domain and characteristics of an appropriate dataset, we show an LSTM-based recurrent network model that subjectively performs quite well on this task. Critically, we provide generated examples. We also include feedback from professional composers and musicians about some of these examples.
Two centuries later, as the foundations of AI were being set, the notion of automatically understanding (and therefore generating) music was among the earliest applications to capture the imagination of researchers, with papers on computational approaches to perception, interpretation and generation of music by Simon, Longuet-Higgins and others @cite_4 @cite_12 @cite_30 @cite_28 @cite_6 . Since then, many interesting efforts were made @cite_42 @cite_18 @cite_22 @cite_2 @cite_11 @cite_17 , and it is clear that in recent years both interest and progress in score generation has continued to advance, e.g. @cite_38 , Boulanger- @cite_32 , @cite_0 , @cite_41 , @cite_19 , Sturm @cite_5 , to name only a few. @cite_20 provide a survey of generative music models that involve machine learning. @cite_43 provide a comprehensive survey and satisfying taxonomy of music generation systems. McDonald @cite_3 gives an overview highlighting some key examples of such work.
@cite_30 @cite_22 @cite_41 @cite_42 @cite_3 @cite_43 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_20 @cite_38 @cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_17 @cite_28 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_19 @cite_12 @cite_0 @cite_11
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Machine learning models of music typically break down the task of composition into a chronological process, composing a piece of music in a single pass from beginning to end. On the contrary, human composers write music in a nonlinear fashion, scribbling motifs here and there, often revisiting choices previously made. We explore the use of blocked Gibbs sampling as an analogue to the human approach, and introduce Coconet, a convolutional neural network in the NADE family of generative models. Despite ostensibly sampling from the same distribution as the NADE ancestral sampling procedure, we find that a blocked Gibbs approach significantly improves sample quality. We provide evidence that this is due to some conditional distributions being poorly modeled. Moreover, we show that even the cheap approximate blocked Gibbs procedure from (2014) yields better samples than ancestral sampling. We demonstrate the versatility of our method on unconditioned polyphonic music generation. From the Publisher: Can humans compute? This is the question to which H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins, one of the founding figures of cognitive science, has devoted his research over the past twenty years. His and his field's intellectual odyssey from the fringe to the center of the scientific world's attention is recounted with wit and grace in this wide-ranging collection of previously published and original essays. The volume begins in the late 1960s, when the author had moved from theoretical chemistry to what was then known as theoretical biology. It traces his search for new concepts with which to establish a science of the mind, and it includes Longuet-Higgins's famous comment on the 1971 Lighthill Report in which he introduced the term "cognitive science" and sketched the possible components of the field. The essays are divided into five parts. The first, Generalities, explores the basic philosophical questions at the root of the new science. The essays on Music show the importance of the musical sense as a testing ground for understanding cognitive processes in general. The author's forays into Language describe some of the major early achievements in the now very active field of computational linguistics. The studies of Vision are all directed to the problem - crucial for the development of machine-vision systems - of inferring the structure of a scene from two views. The author suggests that the chapters on Memory "be treated indulgently as the first attempt of a physical scientist to climb out of the mindless world of atoms and molecules into the real world of subjective experience." H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins is Royal Society ResearchProfessor at the University of Sussex. Mental Processes inaugurates the series Explorations in Cognitive Science, edited by Margaret Boden and co-sponsored by The MIT Press and The British Psychological Society. A Bradford Book. Research on automatic music generation has seen great progress due to the development of deep neural networks. However, the generation of multi-instrument music of arbitrary genres still remains a challenge. Existing research either works on lead sheets or multi-track piano-rolls found in MIDIs, but both musical notations have their limits. In this work, we propose a new task called lead sheet arrangement to avoid such limits. A new recurrent convolutional generative model for the task is proposed, along with three new symbolic-domain harmonic features to facilitate learning from unpaired lead sheets and MIDIs. Our model can generate lead sheets and their arrangements of eight-bar long. Source code and audio samples of the generated result can be found at the project webpage: https: liuhaumin. github.io LeadsheetArrangement This paper introduces a new large-scale music dataset, MusicNet, to serve as a source of supervision and evaluation of machine learning methods for music research. MusicNet consists of hundreds of freely-licensed classical music recordings by 10 composers, written for 11 instruments, together with instrument note annotations resulting in over 1 million temporal labels on 34 hours of chamber music performances under various studio and microphone conditions. @PARASPLIT The paper defines a multi-label classification task to predict notes in musical recordings, along with an evaluation protocol, and benchmarks several machine learning architectures for this task: i) learning from spectrogram features; ii) end-to-end learning with a neural net; iii) end-to-end learning with a convolutional neural net. These experiments show that end-to-end models trained for note prediction learn frequency selective filters as a low-level representation of audio. This paper is a survey and an analysis of different ways of using deep learning (deep artificial neural networks) to generate musical content. We propose a methodology based on five dimensions for our analysis: Objective - What musical content is to be generated? Examples are: melody, polyphony, accompaniment or counterpoint. - For what destination and for what use? To be performed by a human(s) (in the case of a musical score), or by a machine (in the case of an audio file). Representation - What are the concepts to be manipulated? Examples are: waveform, spectrogram, note, chord, meter and beat. - What format is to be used? Examples are: MIDI, piano roll or text. - How will the representation be encoded? Examples are: scalar, one-hot or many-hot. Architecture - What type(s) of deep neural network is (are) to be used? Examples are: feedforward network, recurrent network, autoencoder or generative adversarial networks. Challenge - What are the limitations and open challenges? Examples are: variability, interactivity and creativity. Strategy - How do we model and control the process of generation? Examples are: single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, sampling or input manipulation. For each dimension, we conduct a comparative analysis of various models and techniques and we propose some tentative multidimensional typology. This typology is bottom-up, based on the analysis of many existing deep-learning based systems for music generation selected from the relevant literature. These systems are described and are used to exemplify the various choices of objective, representation, architecture, challenge and strategy. The last section includes some discussion and some prospects. Machine learning models of music typically break up the task of composition into a chronological process, composing a piece of music in a single pass from beginning to end. On the contrary, human composers write music in a nonlinear fashion, scribbling motifs here and there, often revisiting choices previously made. In order to better approximate this process, we train a convolutional neural network to complete partial musical scores, and explore the use of blocked Gibbs sampling as an analogue to rewriting. Neither the model nor the generative procedure are tied to a particular causal direction of composition. Our model is an instance of orderless NADE (, 2014), which allows more direct ancestral sampling. However, we find that Gibbs sampling greatly improves sample quality, which we demonstrate to be due to some conditional distributions being poorly modeled. Moreover, we show that even the cheap approximate blocked Gibbs procedure from (2014) yields better samples than ancestral sampling, based on both log-likelihood and human evaluation. Generating music has a few notable differences from generating images and videos. First, music is an art of time, necessitating a temporal model. Second, music is usually composed of multiple instruments tracks, with close interaction with one another. Each track has its own temporal dynamics, but collectively they unfold over time interdependently. Lastly, for symbolic domain music generation, the targeted output is sequences of discrete musical events, not continuous values. In this paper, we propose and study three generative adversarial networks (GANs) for symbolic-domain multi-track music generation, using a data set of 127,731 MIDI bars of pop rock music. The three models, which differ in the underlying model assumption and accordingly the network architecture, are referred to as the jamming model, composer model, and hybrid model, respectively. We propose a few intra-track and inter-track objective metrics to examine and compare their generation result, in addition to a subjective evaluation. We show that our models can learn from the noisy MIDI files and generate coherent music of four bars right from scratch (i.e. without human inputs). We also propose extensions of our models to facilitate human-AI cooperative music creation: given the piano track composed by human we can generate four additional tracks in return to accompany it. This paper introduces a new large-scale music dataset, MusicNet, to serve as a source of supervision and evaluation of machine learning methods for music research. MusicNet consists of hundreds of freely-licensed classical music recordings by 10 composers, written for 11 instruments, together with instrument note annotations resulting in over 1 million temporal labels on 34 hours of chamber music performances under various studio and microphone conditions. The paper defines a multi-label classification task to predict notes in musical recordings, along with an evaluation protocol, and benchmarks several machine learning architectures for this task: i) learning from spectrogram features; ii) end-to-end learning with a neural net; iii) end-to-end learning with a convolutional neural net. These experiments show that end-to-end models trained for note prediction learn frequency selective filters as a low-level representation of audio. Several methods exist for a computer to generate music based on data including Markov chains, recurrent neural networks, recombinancy, and grammars. We explore the use of unit selection and concatenation as a means of generating music using a procedure based on ranking, where, we consider a unit to be a variable length number of measures of music. We first examine whether a unit selection method, that is restricted to a finite size unit library, can be sufficient for encompassing a wide spectrum of music. We do this by developing a deep autoencoder that encodes a musical input and reconstructs the input by selecting from the library. We then describe a generative model that combines a deep structured semantic model (DSSM) with an LSTM to predict the next unit, where units consist of four, two, and one measures of music. We evaluate the generative model using objective metrics including mean rank and accuracy and with a subjective listening test in which expert musicians are asked to complete a forced-choiced ranking task. We compare our model to a note-level generative baseline that consists of a stacked LSTM trained to predict forward by one note. Realistic music generation is a challenging task. When building generative models of music that are learnt from data, typically high-level representations such as scores or MIDI are used that abstract away the idiosyncrasies of a particular performance. But these nuances are very important for our perception of musicality and realism, so in this work we embark on modelling music in the raw audio domain. It has been shown that autoregressive models excel at generating raw audio waveforms of speech, but when applied to music, we find them biased towards capturing local signal structure at the expense of modelling long-range correlations. This is problematic because music exhibits structure at many different timescales. In this work, we explore autoregressive discrete autoencoders (ADAs) as a means to enable autoregressive models to capture long-range correlations in waveforms. We find that they allow us to unconditionally generate piano music directly in the raw audio domain, which shows stylistic consistency across tens of seconds. Automatic music generation systems have gained in popularity and sophistication as advances in cloud computing have enabled large-scale complex computations such as deep models and optimization algorithms on personal devices. Yet, they still face an important challenge, that of long-term structure, which is key to conveying a sense of musical coherence. We present the MorpheuS music generation system designed to tackle this problem. MorpheuS' novel framework has the ability to generate polyphonic pieces with a given tension profile and long- and short-term repeated pattern structures. A mathematical model for tonal tension quantifies the tension profile and state-of-the-art pattern detection algorithms extract repeated patterns in a template piece. An efficient optimization metaheuristic, variable neighborhood search, generates music by assigning pitches that best fit the prescribed tension profile to the template rhythm while hard constraining long-term structure through the detected patterns. This ability to generate affective music with specific tension profile and long-term structure is particularly useful in a game or film music context. Music generated by the MorpheuS system has been performed live in concerts. Machine-learning techniques have been recently used with spectacular results to generate artefacts such as music or text. However, these techniques are still unable to capture and generate artefacts that are convincingly structured. In this paper we present an approach to generate structured musical sequences. We introduce a mechanism for sampling efficiently variations of musical sequences. Given a input sequence and a statistical model, this mechanism samples a set of sequences whose distance to the input sequence is approximately within specified bounds. This mechanism is implemented as an extension of belief propagation, and uses local fields to bias the generation. We show experimentally that sampled sequences are indeed closely correlated to the standard musical similarity measure defined by Mongeau and Sankoff. We then show how this mechanism can used to implement composition strategies that enforce arbitrary structure on a musical lead sheet generation problem. 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. As one of our highest expressions of thought and creativity, music has always been a difficult realm to capture, model, and understand. The connectionist paradigm, now beginning to provide insights into many realms of human behavior, offers a new and unified viewpoint from which to investigate the subtleties of musical experience. Music and Connectionism provides a fresh approach to both fields, using the techniques of connectionism and parallel distributed processing to look at a wide range of topics in music research, from pitch perception to chord fingering to composition.The contributors, leading researchers in both music psychology and neural networks, address the challenges and opportunities of musical applications of network models. The result is a current and thorough survey of the field that advances understanding of musical phenomena encompassing perception, cognition, composition, and performance, and in methods for network design and analysis.Peter M. Todd is a doctoral candidate in the PDP Research Group of the Psychology Department at Stanford University. Gareth Loy is an award-winning composer, a lecturer in the Music Department of the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the technical staff of Frox Inc.Contributors. Jamshed J. Bharucha. Peter Desain. Mark Dolson. Robert Gjerclingen. Henkjan Honing. B. Keith Jenkins. Jacqueline Jons. Douglas H. Keefe. Tuevo Kohonen. Bernice Laden. Pauli Laine. Otto Laske. Marc Leman. J. P. Lewis. Christoph Lischka. D. Gareth Loy. Ben Miller. Michael Mozer. Samir I. Sayegh. Hajime Sano. Todd Soukup. Don Scarborough. Kalev Tiits. Peter M. Todd. Kari Torkkola. 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. Generating music has a few notable differences from generating images and videos. First, music is an art of time, necessitating a temporal model. Second, music is usually composed of multiple instruments tracks with their own temporal dynamics, but collectively they unfold over time interdependently. Lastly, musical notes are often grouped into chords, arpeggios or melodies in polyphonic music, and thereby introducing a chronological ordering of notes is not naturally suitable. In this paper, we propose three models for symbolic multi-track music generation under the framework of generative adversarial networks (GANs). The three models, which differ in the underlying assumptions and accordingly the network architectures, are referred to as the jamming model, the composer model and the hybrid model. We trained the proposed models on a dataset of over one hundred thousand bars of rock music and applied them to generate piano-rolls of five tracks: bass, drums, guitar, piano and strings. A few intra-track and inter-track objective metrics are also proposed to evaluate the generative results, in addition to a subjective user study. We show that our models can generate coherent music of four bars right from scratch (i.e. without human inputs). We also extend our models to human-AI cooperative music generation: given a specific track composed by human, we can generate four additional tracks to accompany it. All code, the dataset and the rendered audio samples are available at this https URL . The rise of digital music distribution has provided users with unprecedented access to vast song catalogs. In order to help users cope with large collections, music information retrieval systems have been developed to automatically analyze, index, and recommend music based on a user's preferences or search criteria. This dissertation proposes machine learning approaches to content-based, query-by-example search, and investigates applications in music information retrieval. The proposed methods automatically infer and optimize content-based similarity, fuse heterogeneous feature modalities, efficiently index and search under the optimized distance metric, and finally, generate sequential playlists for a specified context or style. Robust evaluation procedures are proposed to counteract issues of subjectivity and lack of explicit ground truth in music similarity and playlist generation. 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. This volume presents the most up-to-date collection of neural network models of music and creativity gathered together in one place. Chapters by leaders in the field cover new connectionist models of pitch perception, tonality, musical streaming, sequential and hierarchical melodic structure, composition, harmonization, rhythmic analysis, sound generation, and creative evolution. The collection combines journal papers on connectionist modeling, cognitive science, and music perception with new papers solicited for this volume. It also contains an extensive bibliography of related work. Contributors: Shumeet Baluja, M.I. Bellgard, Michael A. Casey, Garrison W. Cottrell, Peter Desain, Robert O. Gjerdingen, Mike Greenhough, Niall Griffith, Stephen Grossberg, Henkjan Honing, Todd Jochem, Bruce F. Katz, John F. Kolen, Edward W. Large, Michael C. Mozer, Michael P.A. Page, Caroline Palmer, Jordan B. Pollack, Dean Pomerleau, Stephen W. Smoliar, Ian Taylor, Peter M. Todd, C.P. Tsang, Gregory M. Werner. The paper presents a new approach to discovering general rules of expressive music performance from real performance data via inductive machine learning. A new learning algorithm is briefly presented, and then an experiment with a very large data set (performances of 13 Mozart piano sonatas) is described. The new learning algorithm succeeds in discovering some extremely simple and general principles of musical performance (at the level of individual notes), in the form of categorical prediction rules. These rules turn out to be very robust and general: when tested on performances by a different pianist and even on music of a different style (Chopin), they exhibit a surprisingly high degree of predictive accuracy.