Music is an expressive form of communication often used to convey emotion in scenarios where "words are not enough". Part of this information lies in the musical composition where well-defined language exists. However, a significant amount of information is added during a performance as the musician interprets the composition. The performer injects expressiveness into the written score through variations of different musical properties such as dynamics and tempo. In this paper, we describe a model that can learn to perform sheet music. Our research concludes that the generated performances are indistinguishable from a human performance, thereby passing a test in the spirit of a "musical Turing test".
Music plays an important role in many peoples' lives. Thus it is not surprising that several works focus on the complicated problem of music synthesis. Several attempts have been made at generating musical compositions. One of the earliest generative models, CONCERT'', was architected to compose simple melodies @cite_13 . However, the limitations of CONCERT were that it could not capture the global structure of music. The generated music was said to lack global coherence''. This is problematic as music has long-range dependencies. Based on the CONCERT model, tackled this problem by building a model that could learn longer-range dependencies.
@cite_13
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We introduce a method for imposing higher-level structure on generated, polyphonic music. A Convolutional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (C-RBM) as a generative model is combined with gradient des- cent constraint optimisation to provide further control over the genera- tion process. Among other things, this allows for the use of a “template” piece, from which some structural properties can be extracted, and trans- ferred as constraints to the newly generated material. The sampling pro- cess is guided with Simulated Annealing to avoid local optima, and to find solutions that both satisfy the constraints, and are relatively stable with respect to the C-RBM. Results show that with this approach it is possible to control the higher-level self-similarity structure, the meter, and the tonal properties of the resulting musical piece, while preserving its local musical coherence.