Daily Papers

Multitrack music transcription aims to transcribe a music audio input into the musical notes of multiple instruments simultaneously. It is a very challenging task that typically requires a more complex model to achieve satisfactory result. In addition, prior works mostly focus on transcriptions of regular instruments, however, neglecting vocals, which are usually the most important signal source if present in a piece of music. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture, Perceiver TF, to model the time-frequency representation of audio input for multitrack transcription. Perceiver TF augments the Perceiver architecture by introducing a hierarchical expansion with an additional Transformer layer to model temporal coherence. Accordingly, our model inherits the benefits of Perceiver that posses better scalability, allowing it to well handle transcriptions of many instruments in a single model. In experiments, we train a Perceiver TF to model 12 instrument classes as well as vocal in a multi-task learning manner. Our result demonstrates that the proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts (e.g., MT3 and SpecTNT) on various public datasets.

Existing approaches for generating multitrack music with transformer models have been limited in terms of the number of instruments, the length of the music segments and slow inference. This is partly due to the memory requirements of the lengthy input sequences necessitated by existing representations. In this work, we propose a new multitrack music representation that allows a diverse set of instruments while keeping a short sequence length. Our proposed Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art systems, landing in between two recently proposed models in a subjective listening test, while achieving substantial speedups and memory reductions over both, making the method attractive for real time improvisation or near real time creative applications. Further, we propose a new measure for analyzing musical self-attention and show that the trained model attends more to notes that form a consonant interval with the current note and to notes that are 4N beats away from the current step.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT), inferring musical notes from raw audio, is a challenging task at the core of music understanding. Unlike Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which typically focuses on the words of a single speaker, AMT often requires transcribing multiple instruments simultaneously, all while preserving fine-scale pitch and timing information. Further, many AMT datasets are "low-resource", as even expert musicians find music transcription difficult and time-consuming. Thus, prior work has focused on task-specific architectures, tailored to the individual instruments of each task. In this work, motivated by the promising results of sequence-to-sequence transfer learning for low-resource Natural Language Processing (NLP), we demonstrate that a general-purpose Transformer model can perform multi-task AMT, jointly transcribing arbitrary combinations of musical instruments across several transcription datasets. We show this unified training framework achieves high-quality transcription results across a range of datasets, dramatically improving performance for low-resource instruments (such as guitar), while preserving strong performance for abundant instruments (such as piano). Finally, by expanding the scope of AMT, we expose the need for more consistent evaluation metrics and better dataset alignment, and provide a strong baseline for this new direction of multi-task AMT.

We propose a novel symbolic music representation and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework specially designed for symbolic multitrack music generation. The main theme of symbolic music generation primarily encompasses the preprocessing of music data and the implementation of a deep learning framework. Current techniques dedicated to symbolic music generation generally encounter two significant challenges: training data's lack of information about chords and scales and the requirement of specially designed model architecture adapted to the unique format of symbolic music representation. In this paper, we solve the above problems by introducing new symbolic music representation with MusicLang chord analysis model. We propose our MMT-BERT architecture adapting to the representation. To build a robust multitrack music generator, we fine-tune a pre-trained MusicBERT model to serve as the discriminator, and incorporate relativistic standard loss. This approach, supported by the in-depth understanding of symbolic music encoded within MusicBERT, fortifies the consonance and humanity of music generated by our method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which strictly follows the state-of-the-art methods.

Graphs can be leveraged to model polyphonic multitrack symbolic music, where notes, chords and entire sections may be linked at different levels of the musical hierarchy by tonal and rhythmic relationships. Nonetheless, there is a lack of works that consider graph representations in the context of deep learning systems for music generation. This paper bridges this gap by introducing a novel graph representation for music and a deep Variational Autoencoder that generates the structure and the content of musical graphs separately, one after the other, with a hierarchical architecture that matches the structural priors of music. By separating the structure and content of musical graphs, it is possible to condition generation by specifying which instruments are played at certain times. This opens the door to a new form of human-computer interaction in the context of music co-creation. After training the model on existing MIDI datasets, the experiments show that the model is able to generate appealing short and long musical sequences and to realistically interpolate between them, producing music that is tonally and rhythmically consistent. Finally, the visualization of the embeddings shows that the model is able to organize its latent space in accordance with known musical concepts.

We present and release MIDI-GPT, a generative system based on the Transformer architecture that is designed for computer-assisted music composition workflows. MIDI-GPT supports the infilling of musical material at the track and bar level, and can condition generation on attributes including: instrument type, musical style, note density, polyphony level, and note duration. In order to integrate these features, we employ an alternative representation for musical material, creating a time-ordered sequence of musical events for each track and concatenating several tracks into a single sequence, rather than using a single time-ordered sequence where the musical events corresponding to different tracks are interleaved. We also propose a variation of our representation allowing for expressiveness. We present experimental results that demonstrate that MIDI-GPT is able to consistently avoid duplicating the musical material it was trained on, generate music that is stylistically similar to the training dataset, and that attribute controls allow enforcing various constraints on the generated material. We also outline several real-world applications of MIDI-GPT, including collaborations with industry partners that explore the integration and evaluation of MIDI-GPT into commercial products, as well as several artistic works produced using it.

The recent explosion of generative AI-Music systems has raised numerous concerns over data copyright, licensing music from musicians, and the conflict between open-source AI and large prestige companies. Such issues highlight the need for publicly available, copyright-free musical data, in which there is a large shortage, particularly for symbolic music data. To alleviate this issue, we present PDMX: a large-scale open-source dataset of over 250K public domain MusicXML scores collected from the score-sharing forum MuseScore, making it the largest available copyright-free symbolic music dataset to our knowledge. PDMX additionally includes a wealth of both tag and user interaction metadata, allowing us to efficiently analyze the dataset and filter for high quality user-generated scores. Given the additional metadata afforded by our data collection process, we conduct multitrack music generation experiments evaluating how different representative subsets of PDMX lead to different behaviors in downstream models, and how user-rating statistics can be used as an effective measure of data quality. Examples can be found at https://pnlong.github.io/PDMX.demo/.

Controllable music generation promotes the interaction between humans and composition systems by projecting the users' intent on their desired music. The challenge of introducing controllability is an increasingly important issue in the symbolic music generation field. When building controllable generative popular multi-instrument music systems, two main challenges typically present themselves, namely weak controllability and poor music quality. To address these issues, we first propose spatiotemporal features as powerful and fine-grained controls to enhance the controllability of the generative model. In addition, an efficient music representation called REMI_Track is designed to convert multitrack music into multiple parallel music sequences and shorten the sequence length of each track with Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) techniques. Subsequently, we release BandControlNet, a conditional model based on parallel Transformers, to tackle the multiple music sequences and generate high-quality music samples that are conditioned to the given spatiotemporal control features. More concretely, the two specially designed modules of BandControlNet, namely structure-enhanced self-attention (SE-SA) and Cross-Track Transformer (CTT), are utilized to strengthen the resulting musical structure and inter-track harmony modeling respectively. Experimental results tested on two popular music datasets of different lengths demonstrate that the proposed BandControlNet outperforms other conditional music generation models on most objective metrics in terms of fidelity and inference speed and shows great robustness in generating long music samples. The subjective evaluations show BandControlNet trained on short datasets can generate music with comparable quality to state-of-the-art models, while outperforming them significantly using longer datasets.

This technical report presents a new paradigm for full-song symbolic music generation. Existing symbolic models operate on note-attribute tokens and suffer from extremely long sequences, limited context length, and weak support for long-range structure. We address these issues by introducing PhraseVAE and PhraseLDM, the first latent diffusion framework designed for full-song multitrack symbolic music. PhraseVAE compresses an arbitrary variable-length polyphonic note sequence into a single compact 64-dimensional phrase-level latent representation with high reconstruction fidelity, allowing a well-structured latent space and efficient generative modeling. Built on this latent space, PhraseLDM generates an entire multi-track song in a single pass without any autoregressive components. The system eliminates bar-wise sequential modeling, supports up to 128 bars of music (8 minutes at 64 bpm), and produces complete songs with coherent local texture, idiomatic instrument patterns, and clear global structure. With only 45M parameters, our framework generates a full song within seconds while maintaining competitive musical quality and generation diversity. Together, these results show that phrase-level latent diffusion provides an effective and scalable solution to long-sequence modeling in symbolic music generation. We hope this work encourages future symbolic music research to move beyond note-attribute tokens and to consider phrase-level units as a more effective and musically meaningful modeling target.

We present MIDI-LLM, an LLM for generating multitrack MIDI music from free-form text prompts. Our approach expands a text LLM's vocabulary to include MIDI tokens, and uses a two-stage training recipe to endow text-to-MIDI abilities. By preserving the original LLM's parameter structure, we can directly leverage the vLLM library for accelerated inference. Experiments show that MIDI-LLM achieves higher quality, better text control, and faster inference compared to the recent Text2midi model. Live demo at https://midi-llm-demo.vercel.app.

We propose an end-to-end music mixing style transfer system that converts the mixing style of an input multitrack to that of a reference song. This is achieved with an encoder pre-trained with a contrastive objective to extract only audio effects related information from a reference music recording. All our models are trained in a self-supervised manner from an already-processed wet multitrack dataset with an effective data preprocessing method that alleviates the data scarcity of obtaining unprocessed dry data. We analyze the proposed encoder for the disentanglement capability of audio effects and also validate its performance for mixing style transfer through both objective and subjective evaluations. From the results, we show the proposed system not only converts the mixing style of multitrack audio close to a reference but is also robust with mixture-wise style transfer upon using a music source separation model.

Choral singing, a widely practiced form of ensemble singing, lacks comprehensive datasets in the realm of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research, due to challenges arising from the requirement to curate multitrack recordings. To address this, we devised a novel methodology, leveraging state-of-the-art synthesizers to create and curate quality renditions. The scores were sourced from Choral Public Domain Library(CPDL). This work is done in collaboration with a diverse team of musicians, software engineers and researchers. The resulting dataset, complete with its associated metadata, and methodology is released as part of this work, opening up new avenues for exploration and advancement in the field of singing voice research.

Diffusion models have shown promising results in cross-modal generation tasks involving audio and music, such as text-to-sound and text-to-music generation. These text-controlled music generation models typically focus on generating music by capturing global musical attributes like genre and mood. However, music composition is a complex, multilayered task that often involves musical arrangement as an integral part of the process. This process involves composing each instrument to align with existing ones in terms of beat, dynamics, harmony, and melody, requiring greater precision and control over tracks than text prompts usually provide. In this work, we address these challenges by extending the MusicLDM, a latent diffusion model for music, into a multi-track generative model. By learning the joint probability of tracks sharing a context, our model is capable of generating music across several tracks that correspond well to each other, either conditionally or unconditionally. Additionally, our model is capable of arrangement generation, where the model can generate any subset of tracks given the others (e.g., generating a piano track complementing given bass and drum tracks). We compared our model with an existing multi-track generative model and demonstrated that our model achieves considerable improvements across objective metrics for both total and arrangement generation tasks.

We propose the Multi-Track Music Machine (MMM), a generative system based on the Transformer architecture that is capable of generating multi-track music. In contrast to previous work, which represents musical material as a single time-ordered sequence, where the musical events corresponding to different tracks are interleaved, we create a time-ordered sequence of musical events for each track and concatenate several tracks into a single sequence. This takes advantage of the Transformer's attention-mechanism, which can adeptly handle long-term dependencies. We explore how various representations can offer the user a high degree of control at generation time, providing an interactive demo that accommodates track-level and bar-level inpainting, and offers control over track instrumentation and note density.

Diffusion models have recently shown strong potential in both music generation and music source separation tasks. Although in early stages, a trend is emerging towards integrating these tasks into a single framework, as both involve generating musically aligned parts and can be seen as facets of the same generative process. In this work, we introduce a latent diffusion-based multi-track generation model capable of both source separation and multi-track music synthesis by learning the joint probability distribution of tracks sharing a musical context. Our model also enables arrangement generation by creating any subset of tracks given the others. We trained our model on the Slakh2100 dataset, compared it with an existing simultaneous generation and separation model, and observed significant improvements across objective metrics for source separation, music, and arrangement generation tasks. Sound examples are available at https://msg-ld.github.io/.

Large language models have shown significant capabilities across various domains, including symbolic music generation. However, leveraging these pre-trained models for controllable music arrangement tasks, each requiring different forms of musical information as control, remains a novel challenge. In this paper, we propose a unified sequence-to-sequence framework that enables the fine-tuning of a symbolic music language model for multiple multi-track arrangement tasks, including band arrangement, piano reduction, drum arrangement, and voice separation. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves higher musical quality compared to task-specific baselines across all four tasks. Furthermore, through additional experiments on probing analysis, we show the pre-training phase equips the model with essential knowledge to understand musical conditions, which is hard to acquired solely through task-specific fine-tuning.

We present a novel music generation framework for music infilling, with a user friendly interface. Infilling refers to the task of generating musical sections given the surrounding multi-track music. The proposed transformer-based framework is extensible for new control tokens as the added music control tokens such as tonal tension per bar and track polyphony level in this work. We explore the effects of including several musically meaningful control tokens, and evaluate the results using objective metrics related to pitch and rhythm. Our results demonstrate that adding additional control tokens helps to generate music with stronger stylistic similarities to the original music. It also provides the user with more control to change properties like the music texture and tonal tension in each bar compared to previous research which only provided control for track density. We present the model in a Google Colab notebook to enable interactive generation.

With rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence, the text-to-music synthesis task has emerged as a promising direction for music generation from scratch. However, finer-grained control over multi-track generation remains an open challenge. Existing models exhibit strong raw generation capability but lack the flexibility to compose separate tracks and combine them in a controllable manner, differing from typical workflows of human composers. To address this issue, we propose JEN-1 Composer, a unified framework to efficiently model marginal, conditional, and joint distributions over multi-track music via a single model. JEN-1 Composer framework exhibits the capacity to seamlessly incorporate any diffusion-based music generation system, e.g. Jen-1, enhancing its capacity for versatile multi-track music generation. We introduce a curriculum training strategy aimed at incrementally instructing the model in the transition from single-track generation to the flexible generation of multi-track combinations. During the inference, users have the ability to iteratively produce and choose music tracks that meet their preferences, subsequently creating an entire musical composition incrementally following the proposed Human-AI co-composition workflow. Quantitative and qualitative assessments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in controllable and high-fidelity multi-track music synthesis. The proposed JEN-1 Composer represents a significant advance toward interactive AI-facilitated music creation and composition. Demos will be available at https://jenmusic.ai/audio-demos.

In this paper, we introduce Jointist, an instrument-aware multi-instrument framework that is capable of transcribing, recognizing, and separating multiple musical instruments from an audio clip. Jointist consists of the instrument recognition module that conditions the other modules: the transcription module that outputs instrument-specific piano rolls, and the source separation module that utilizes instrument information and transcription results. The instrument conditioning is designed for an explicit multi-instrument functionality while the connection between the transcription and source separation modules is for better transcription performance. Our challenging problem formulation makes the model highly useful in the real world given that modern popular music typically consists of multiple instruments. However, its novelty necessitates a new perspective on how to evaluate such a model. During the experiment, we assess the model from various aspects, providing a new evaluation perspective for multi-instrument transcription. We also argue that transcription models can be utilized as a preprocessing module for other music analysis tasks. In the experiment on several downstream tasks, the symbolic representation provided by our transcription model turned out to be helpful to spectrograms in solving downbeat detection, chord recognition, and key estimation.

Multimodal music generation aims to produce music from diverse input modalities, including text, videos, and images. Existing methods use a common embedding space for multimodal fusion. Despite their effectiveness in other modalities, their application in multimodal music generation faces challenges of data scarcity, weak cross-modal alignment, and limited controllability. This paper addresses these issues by using explicit bridges of text and music for multimodal alignment. We introduce a novel method named Visuals Music Bridge (VMB). Specifically, a Multimodal Music Description Model converts visual inputs into detailed textual descriptions to provide the text bridge; a Dual-track Music Retrieval module that combines broad and targeted retrieval strategies to provide the music bridge and enable user control. Finally, we design an Explicitly Conditioned Music Generation framework to generate music based on the two bridges. We conduct experiments on video-to-music, image-to-music, text-to-music, and controllable music generation tasks, along with experiments on controllability. The results demonstrate that VMB significantly enhances music quality, modality, and customization alignment compared to previous methods. VMB sets a new standard for interpretable and expressive multimodal music generation with applications in various multimedia fields. Demos and code are available at https://github.com/wbs2788/VMB.

As digital music production has become mainstream, the selection of appropriate virtual instruments plays a crucial role in determining the quality of music. To search the musical instrument samples or virtual instruments that make one's desired sound, music producers use their ears to listen and compare each instrument sample in their collection, which is time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, we call this task as Musical Instrument Retrieval and propose a method for retrieving desired musical instruments using reference music mixture as a query. The proposed model consists of the Single-Instrument Encoder and the Multi-Instrument Encoder, both based on convolutional neural networks. The Single-Instrument Encoder is trained to classify the instruments used in single-track audio, and we take its penultimate layer's activation as the instrument embedding. The Multi-Instrument Encoder is trained to estimate multiple instrument embeddings using the instrument embeddings computed by the Single-Instrument Encoder as a set of target embeddings. For more generalized training and realistic evaluation, we also propose a new dataset called Nlakh. Experimental results showed that the Single-Instrument Encoder was able to learn the mapping from the audio signal of unseen instruments to the instrument embedding space and the Multi-Instrument Encoder was able to extract multiple embeddings from the mixture of music and retrieve the desired instruments successfully. The code used for the experiment and audio samples are available at: https://github.com/minju0821/musical_instrument_retrieval

The Charlie Parker Omnibook is a cornerstone of jazz music education, described by pianist Ethan Iverson as "the most important jazz education text ever published". In this work we propose a new transcription pipeline and explore the extent to which state of the art music technology is able to reconstruct these scores directly from the audio without human intervention. Our pipeline includes: a newly trained source separation model for saxophone, a new MIDI transcription model for solo saxophone and an adaptation of an existing MIDI-to-score method for monophonic instruments. To assess this pipeline we also provide an enhanced dataset of Charlie Parker transcriptions as score-audio pairs with accurate MIDI alignments and downbeat annotations. This represents a challenging new benchmark for automatic audio-to-score transcription that we hope will advance research into areas beyond transcribing audio-to-MIDI alone. Together, these form another step towards producing scores that musicians can use directly, without the need for onerous corrections or revisions. To facilitate future research, all model checkpoints and data are made available to download along with code for the transcription pipeline. Improvements in our modular pipeline could one day make the automatic transcription of complex jazz solos a routine possibility, thereby enriching the resources available for music education and preservation.

Multi-instrument music transcription aims to convert polyphonic music recordings into musical scores assigned to each instrument. This task is challenging for modeling as it requires simultaneously identifying multiple instruments and transcribing their pitch and precise timing, and the lack of fully annotated data adds to the training difficulties. This paper introduces YourMT3+, a suite of models for enhanced multi-instrument music transcription based on the recent language token decoding approach of MT3. We enhance its encoder by adopting a hierarchical attention transformer in the time-frequency domain and integrating a mixture of experts. To address data limitations, we introduce a new multi-channel decoding method for training with incomplete annotations and propose intra- and cross-stem augmentation for dataset mixing. Our experiments demonstrate direct vocal transcription capabilities, eliminating the need for voice separation pre-processors. Benchmarks across ten public datasets show our models' competitiveness with, or superiority to, existing transcription models. Further testing on pop music recordings highlights the limitations of current models. Fully reproducible code and datasets are available with demos at https://github.com/mimbres/YourMT3.

Estimating piano dynamic from audio recordings is a fundamental challenge in computational music analysis. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-task network that jointly predicts dynamic levels, change points, beats, and downbeats from a shared latent representation. These four targets form the metrical structure of dynamics in the music score. Inspired by recent vocal dynamic research, we use a multi-scale network as the backbone, which takes Bark-scale specific loudness as the input feature. Compared to log-Mel as input, this reduces model size from 14.7 M to 0.5 M, enabling long sequential input. We use a 60-second audio length in audio segmentation, which doubled the length of beat tracking commonly used. Evaluated on the public MazurkaBL dataset, our model achieves state-of-the-art results across all tasks. This work sets a new benchmark for piano dynamic estimation and delivers a powerful and compact tool, paving the way for large-scale, resource-efficient analysis of musical expression.

We present FiloBass: a novel corpus of music scores and annotations which focuses on the important but often overlooked role of the double bass in jazz accompaniment. Inspired by recent work that sheds light on the role of the soloist, we offer a collection of 48 manually verified transcriptions of professional jazz bassists, comprising over 50,000 note events, which are based on the backing tracks used in the FiloSax dataset. For each recording we provide audio stems, scores, performance-aligned MIDI and associated metadata for beats, downbeats, chord symbols and markers for musical form. We then use FiloBass to enrich our understanding of jazz bass lines, by conducting a corpus-based musical analysis with a contrastive study of existing instructional methods. Together with the original FiloSax dataset, our work represents a significant step toward a fully annotated performance dataset for a jazz quartet setting. By illuminating the critical role of the bass in jazz, this work contributes to a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the genre.

Music is characterized by complex hierarchical structures. Developing a comprehensive model to capture these structures has been a significant challenge in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Prior research has mainly focused on addressing individual tasks for specific hierarchical levels, rather than providing a unified approach. In this paper, we introduce a versatile, all-in-one model that jointly performs beat and downbeat tracking as well as functional structure segmentation and labeling. The model leverages source-separated spectrograms as inputs and employs dilated neighborhood attentions to capture temporal long-term dependencies, along with non-dilated attentions for local instrumental dependencies. Consequently, the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in all four tasks on the Harmonix Set while maintaining a relatively lower number of parameters compared to recent state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, our ablation study demonstrates that the concurrent learning of beats, downbeats, and segments can lead to enhanced performance, with each task mutually benefiting from the others.

The ACM Recommender Systems Challenge 2018 focused on the task of automatic music playlist continuation, which is a form of the more general task of sequential recommendation. Given a playlist of arbitrary length with some additional meta-data, the task was to recommend up to 500 tracks that fit the target characteristics of the original playlist. For the RecSys Challenge, Spotify released a dataset of one million user-generated playlists. Participants could compete in two tracks, i.e., main and creative tracks. Participants in the main track were only allowed to use the provided training set, however, in the creative track, the use of external public sources was permitted. In total, 113 teams submitted 1,228 runs to the main track; 33 teams submitted 239 runs to the creative track. The highest performing team in the main track achieved an R-precision of 0.2241, an NDCG of 0.3946, and an average number of recommended songs clicks of 1.784. In the creative track, an R-precision of 0.2233, an NDCG of 0.3939, and a click rate of 1.785 was obtained by the best team. This article provides an overview of the challenge, including motivation, task definition, dataset description, and evaluation. We further report and analyze the results obtained by the top performing teams in each track and explore the approaches taken by the winners. We finally summarize our key findings, discuss generalizability of approaches and results to domains other than music, and list the open avenues and possible future directions in the area of automatic playlist continuation.

In the domain of symbolic music research, the progress of developing scalable systems has been notably hindered by the scarcity of available training data and the demand for models tailored to specific tasks. To address these issues, we propose MelodyT5, a novel unified framework that leverages an encoder-decoder architecture tailored for symbolic music processing in ABC notation. This framework challenges the conventional task-specific approach, considering various symbolic music tasks as score-to-score transformations. Consequently, it integrates seven melody-centric tasks, from generation to harmonization and segmentation, within a single model. Pre-trained on MelodyHub, a newly curated collection featuring over 261K unique melodies encoded in ABC notation and encompassing more than one million task instances, MelodyT5 demonstrates superior performance in symbolic music processing via multi-task transfer learning. Our findings highlight the efficacy of multi-task transfer learning in symbolic music processing, particularly for data-scarce tasks, challenging the prevailing task-specific paradigms and offering a comprehensive dataset and framework for future explorations in this domain.

We present the Melody Guided Music Generation (MMGen) model, the first novel approach using melody to guide the music generation that, despite a pretty simple method and extremely limited resources, achieves excellent performance. Specifically, we first align the melody with audio waveforms and their associated descriptions using the multimodal alignment module. Subsequently, we condition the diffusion module on the learned melody representations. This allows MMGen to generate music that matches the style of the provided audio while also producing music that reflects the content of the given text description. To address the scarcity of high-quality data, we construct a multi-modal dataset, MusicSet, which includes melody, text, and audio, and will be made publicly available. We conduct extensive experiments which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model both in terms of experimental metrics and actual performance quality.

Music source separation demixes a piece of music into its individual sound sources (vocals, percussion, melodic instruments, etc.), a task with no simple mathematical solution. It requires deep learning methods involving training on large datasets of isolated music stems. The most commonly available datasets are made from commercial Western music, limiting the models' applications to non-Western genres like Carnatic music. Carnatic music is a live tradition, with the available multi-track recordings containing overlapping sounds and bleeds between the sources. This poses a challenge to commercially available source separation models like Spleeter and Hybrid Demucs. In this work, we introduce 'Sanidha', the first open-source novel dataset for Carnatic music, offering studio-quality, multi-track recordings with minimal to no overlap or bleed. Along with the audio files, we provide high-definition videos of the artists' performances. Additionally, we fine-tuned Spleeter, one of the most commonly used source separation models, on our dataset and observed improved SDR performance compared to fine-tuning on a pre-existing Carnatic multi-track dataset. The outputs of the fine-tuned model with 'Sanidha' are evaluated through a listening study.

Despite significant recent progress across multiple subtasks of audio source separation, few music source separation systems support separation beyond the four-stem vocals, drums, bass, and other (VDBO) setup. Of the very few current systems that support source separation beyond this setup, most continue to rely on an inflexible decoder setup that can only support a fixed pre-defined set of stems. Increasing stem support in these inflexible systems correspondingly requires increasing computational complexity, rendering extensions of these systems computationally infeasible for long-tail instruments. In this work, we propose Banquet, a system that allows source separation of multiple stems using just one decoder. A bandsplit source separation model is extended to work in a query-based setup in tandem with a music instrument recognition PaSST model. On the MoisesDB dataset, Banquet, at only 24.9 M trainable parameters, approached the performance level of the significantly more complex 6-stem Hybrid Transformer Demucs on VDBO stems and outperformed it on guitar and piano. The query-based setup allows for the separation of narrow instrument classes such as clean acoustic guitars, and can be successfully applied to the extraction of less common stems such as reeds and organs. Implementation is available at https://github.com/kwatcharasupat/query-bandit.

We present Subtractive Training, a simple and novel method for synthesizing individual musical instrument stems given other instruments as context. This method pairs a dataset of complete music mixes with 1) a variant of the dataset lacking a specific stem, and 2) LLM-generated instructions describing how the missing stem should be reintroduced. We then fine-tune a pretrained text-to-audio diffusion model to generate the missing instrument stem, guided by both the existing stems and the text instruction. Our results demonstrate Subtractive Training's efficacy in creating authentic drum stems that seamlessly blend with the existing tracks. We also show that we can use the text instruction to control the generation of the inserted stem in terms of rhythm, dynamics, and genre, allowing us to modify the style of a single instrument in a full song while keeping the remaining instruments the same. Lastly, we extend this technique to MIDI formats, successfully generating compatible bass, drum, and guitar parts for incomplete arrangements.

Optical Music Recognition is a field that has progressed significantly, bringing accurate systems that transcribe effectively music scores into digital formats. Despite this, there are still several limitations that hinder OMR from achieving its full potential. Specifically, state of the art OMR still depends on multi-stage pipelines for performing full-page transcription, as well as it has only been demonstrated in monophonic cases, leaving behind very relevant engravings. In this work, we present the Sheet Music Transformer++, an end-to-end model that is able to transcribe full-page polyphonic music scores without the need of a previous Layout Analysis step. This is done thanks to an extensive curriculum learning-based pretraining with synthetic data generation. We conduct several experiments on a full-page extension of a public polyphonic transcription dataset. The experimental outcomes confirm that the model is competent at transcribing full-page pianoform scores, marking a noteworthy milestone in end-to-end OMR transcription.

In this paper, we introduce the MoisesDB dataset for musical source separation. It consists of 240 tracks from 45 artists, covering twelve musical genres. For each song, we provide its individual audio sources, organized in a two-level hierarchical taxonomy of stems. This will facilitate building and evaluating fine-grained source separation systems that go beyond the limitation of using four stems (drums, bass, other, and vocals) due to lack of data. To facilitate the adoption of this dataset, we publish an easy-to-use Python library to download, process and use MoisesDB. Alongside a thorough documentation and analysis of the dataset contents, this work provides baseline results for open-source separation models for varying separation granularities (four, five, and six stems), and discuss their results.

Virtual Analog (VA) modeling aims to simulate the behavior of hardware circuits via algorithms to replicate their tone digitally. Dynamic Range Compressor (DRC) is an audio processing module that controls the dynamics of a track by reducing and amplifying the volumes of loud and quiet sounds, which is essential in music production. In recent years, neural-network-based VA modeling has shown great potential in producing high-fidelity models. However, due to the lack of data quantity and diversity, their generalization ability in different parameter settings and input sounds is still limited. To tackle this problem, we present Diff-SSL-G-Comp, the first large-scale and diverse dataset for modeling the SSL 500 G-Bus Compressor. Specifically, we manually collected 175 unmastered songs from the Cambridge Multitrack Library. We recorded the compressed audio in 220 parameter combinations, resulting in an extensive 2528-hour dataset with diverse genres, instruments, tempos, and keys. Moreover, to facilitate the use of our proposed dataset, we conducted benchmark experiments in various open-sourced black-box and grey-box models, as well as white-box plugins. We also conducted ablation studies in different data subsets to illustrate the effectiveness of improved data diversity and quantity. The dataset and demos are on our project page: http://www.yichenggu.com/DiffSSLGComp/.

Music scores are written representations of music and contain rich information about musical components. The visual information on music scores includes notes, rests, staff lines, clefs, dynamics, and articulations. This visual information in music scores contains more semantic information than audio and symbolic representations of music. Previous music score datasets have limited sizes and are mainly designed for optical music recognition (OMR). There is a lack of research on creating a large-scale benchmark dataset for music modeling and generation. In this work, we propose MusicScore, a large-scale music score dataset collected and processed from the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). MusicScore consists of image-text pairs, where the image is a page of a music score and the text is the metadata of the music. The metadata of MusicScore is extracted from the general information section of the IMSLP pages. The metadata includes rich information about the composer, instrument, piece style, and genre of the music pieces. MusicScore is curated into small, medium, and large scales of 400, 14k, and 200k image-text pairs with varying diversity, respectively. We build a score generation system based on a UNet diffusion model to generate visually readable music scores conditioned on text descriptions to benchmark the MusicScore dataset for music score generation. MusicScore is released to the public at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZheqiDAI/MusicScore.

Text-to-Music Retrieval, finding music based on a given natural language query, plays a pivotal role in content discovery within extensive music databases. To address this challenge, prior research has predominantly focused on a joint embedding of music audio and text, utilizing it to retrieve music tracks that exactly match descriptive queries related to musical attributes (i.e. genre, instrument) and contextual elements (i.e. mood, theme). However, users also articulate a need to explore music that shares similarities with their favorite tracks or artists, such as I need a similar track to Superstition by Stevie Wonder. To address these concerns, this paper proposes an improved Text-to-Music Retrieval model, denoted as TTMR++, which utilizes rich text descriptions generated with a finetuned large language model and metadata. To accomplish this, we obtained various types of seed text from several existing music tag and caption datasets and a knowledge graph dataset of artists and tracks. The experimental results show the effectiveness of TTMR++ in comparison to state-of-the-art music-text joint embedding models through a comprehensive evaluation involving various musical text queries.

Many applications of cross-modal music retrieval are related to connecting sheet music images to audio recordings. A typical and recent approach to this is to learn, via deep neural networks, a joint embedding space that correlates short fixed-size snippets of audio and sheet music by means of an appropriate similarity structure. However, two challenges that arise out of this strategy are the requirement of strongly aligned data to train the networks, and the inherent discrepancies of musical content between audio and sheet music snippets caused by local and global tempo differences. In this paper, we address these two shortcomings by designing a cross-modal recurrent network that learns joint embeddings that can summarize longer passages of corresponding audio and sheet music. The benefits of our method are that it only requires weakly aligned audio-sheet music pairs, as well as that the recurrent network handles the non-linearities caused by tempo variations between audio and sheet music. We conduct a number of experiments on synthetic and real piano data and scores, showing that our proposed recurrent method leads to more accurate retrieval in all possible configurations.

Existing text-to-music models can produce high-quality audio with great diversity. However, textual prompts alone cannot precisely control temporal musical features such as chords and rhythm of the generated music. To address this challenge, we introduce MusiConGen, a temporally-conditioned Transformer-based text-to-music model that builds upon the pretrained MusicGen framework. Our innovation lies in an efficient finetuning mechanism, tailored for consumer-grade GPUs, that integrates automatically-extracted rhythm and chords as the condition signal. During inference, the condition can either be musical features extracted from a reference audio signal, or be user-defined symbolic chord sequence, BPM, and textual prompts. Our performance evaluation on two datasets -- one derived from extracted features and the other from user-created inputs -- demonstrates that MusiConGen can generate realistic backing track music that aligns well with the specified conditions. We open-source the code and model checkpoints, and provide audio examples online, https://musicongen.github.io/musicongen_demo/.

Mean Opinion Score (MOS) prediction for text to music systems requires evaluating both overall musical quality and text prompt alignment. This paper introduces WhisQ, a multimodal architecture that addresses this dual-assessment challenge through sequence level co-attention and optimal transport regularization. WhisQ employs the Whisper Base pretrained model for temporal audio encoding and Qwen 3, a 0.6B Small Language Model (SLM), for text encoding, with both maintaining sequence structure for fine grained cross-modal modeling. The architecture features specialized prediction pathways: OMQ is predicted from pooled audio embeddings, while TA leverages bidirectional sequence co-attention between audio and text. Sinkhorn optimal transport loss further enforce semantic alignment in the shared embedding space. On the MusicEval Track-1 dataset, WhisQ achieves substantial improvements over the baseline: 7% improvement in Spearman correlation for OMQ and 14% for TA. Ablation studies reveal that optimal transport regularization provides the largest performance gain (10% SRCC improvement), demonstrating the importance of explicit cross-modal alignment for text-to-music evaluation.

Music exists in various modalities, such as score images, symbolic scores, MIDI, and audio. Translations between each modality are established as core tasks of music information retrieval, such as automatic music transcription (audio-to-MIDI) and optical music recognition (score image to symbolic score). However, most past work on multimodal translation trains specialized models on individual translation tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified approach, where we train a general-purpose model on many translation tasks simultaneously. Two key factors make this unified approach viable: a new large-scale dataset and the tokenization of each modality. Firstly, we propose a new dataset that consists of more than 1,300 hours of paired audio-score image data collected from YouTube videos, which is an order of magnitude larger than any existing music modal translation datasets. Secondly, our unified tokenization framework discretizes score images, audio, MIDI, and MusicXML into a sequence of tokens, enabling a single encoder-decoder Transformer to tackle multiple cross-modal translation as one coherent sequence-to-sequence task. Experimental results confirm that our unified multitask model improves upon single-task baselines in several key areas, notably reducing the symbol error rate for optical music recognition from 24.58% to a state-of-the-art 13.67%, while similarly substantial improvements are observed across the other translation tasks. Notably, our approach achieves the first successful score-image-conditioned audio generation, marking a significant breakthrough in cross-modal music generation.

We demonstrate the efficacy of using intermediate representations from a single foundation model to enhance various music downstream tasks. We introduce SoniDo , a music foundation model (MFM) designed to extract hierarchical features from target music samples. By leveraging hierarchical intermediate features, SoniDo constrains the information granularity, leading to improved performance across various downstream tasks including both understanding and generative tasks. We specifically evaluated this approach on representative tasks such as music tagging, music transcription, music source separation, and music mixing. Our results reveal that the features extracted from foundation models provide valuable enhancements in training downstream task models. This highlights the capability of using features extracted from music foundation models as a booster for downstream tasks. Our approach not only benefits existing task-specific models but also supports music downstream tasks constrained by data scarcity. This paves the way for more effective and accessible music processing solutions.

Diffusion models have shown promising results in cross-modal generation tasks, including text-to-image and text-to-audio generation. However, generating music, as a special type of audio, presents unique challenges due to limited availability of music data and sensitive issues related to copyright and plagiarism. In this paper, to tackle these challenges, we first construct a state-of-the-art text-to-music model, MusicLDM, that adapts Stable Diffusion and AudioLDM architectures to the music domain. We achieve this by retraining the contrastive language-audio pretraining model (CLAP) and the Hifi-GAN vocoder, as components of MusicLDM, on a collection of music data samples. Then, to address the limitations of training data and to avoid plagiarism, we leverage a beat tracking model and propose two different mixup strategies for data augmentation: beat-synchronous audio mixup and beat-synchronous latent mixup, which recombine training audio directly or via a latent embeddings space, respectively. Such mixup strategies encourage the model to interpolate between musical training samples and generate new music within the convex hull of the training data, making the generated music more diverse while still staying faithful to the corresponding style. In addition to popular evaluation metrics, we design several new evaluation metrics based on CLAP score to demonstrate that our proposed MusicLDM and beat-synchronous mixup strategies improve both the quality and novelty of generated music, as well as the correspondence between input text and generated music.

Music is essential when editing videos, but selecting music manually is difficult and time-consuming. Thus, we seek to automatically generate background music tracks given video input. This is a challenging task since it requires music-video datasets, efficient architectures for video-to-music generation, and reasonable metrics, none of which currently exist. To close this gap, we introduce a complete recipe including dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric for video background music generation. We present SymMV, a video and symbolic music dataset with various musical annotations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first video-music dataset with rich musical annotations. We also propose a benchmark video background music generation framework named V-MusProd, which utilizes music priors of chords, melody, and accompaniment along with video-music relations of semantic, color, and motion features. To address the lack of objective metrics for video-music correspondence, we design a retrieval-based metric VMCP built upon a powerful video-music representation learning model. Experiments show that with our dataset, V-MusProd outperforms the state-of-the-art method in both music quality and correspondence with videos. We believe our dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric will boost the development of video background music generation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/zhuole1025/SymMV.

Generating sound effects for videos often requires creating artistic sound effects that diverge significantly from real-life sources and flexible control in the sound design. To address this problem, we introduce MultiFoley, a model designed for video-guided sound generation that supports multimodal conditioning through text, audio, and video. Given a silent video and a text prompt, MultiFoley allows users to create clean sounds (e.g., skateboard wheels spinning without wind noise) or more whimsical sounds (e.g., making a lion's roar sound like a cat's meow). MultiFoley also allows users to choose reference audio from sound effects (SFX) libraries or partial videos for conditioning. A key novelty of our model lies in its joint training on both internet video datasets with low-quality audio and professional SFX recordings, enabling high-quality, full-bandwidth (48kHz) audio generation. Through automated evaluations and human studies, we demonstrate that MultiFoley successfully generates synchronized high-quality sounds across varied conditional inputs and outperforms existing methods. Please see our project page for video results: https://ificl.github.io/MultiFoley/

This paper targets the perceptual task of separating the different interacting voices, i.e., monophonic melodic streams, in a polyphonic musical piece. We target symbolic music, where notes are explicitly encoded, and model this task as a Multi-Trajectory Tracking (MTT) problem from discrete observations, i.e., notes in a pitch-time space. Our approach builds a graph from a musical piece, by creating one node for every note, and separates the melodic trajectories by predicting a link between two notes if they are consecutive in the same voice/stream. This kind of local, greedy prediction is made possible by node embeddings created by a heterogeneous graph neural network that can capture inter- and intra-trajectory information. Furthermore, we propose a new regularization loss that encourages the output to respect the MTT premise of at most one incoming and one outgoing link for every node, favouring monophonic (voice) trajectories; this loss function might also be useful in other general MTT scenarios. Our approach does not use domain-specific heuristics, is scalable to longer sequences and a higher number of voices, and can handle complex cases such as voice inversions and overlaps. We reach new state-of-the-art results for the voice separation task in classical music of different styles.

Large models for text-to-music generation have achieved significant progress, facilitating the creation of high-quality and varied musical compositions from provided text prompts. However, input text prompts may not precisely capture user requirements, particularly when the objective is to generate music that embodies a specific concept derived from a designated reference collection. In this paper, we propose a novel method for customized text-to-music generation, which can capture the concept from a two-minute reference music and generate a new piece of music conforming to the concept. We achieve this by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-music model using the reference music. However, directly fine-tuning all parameters leads to overfitting issues. To address this problem, we propose a Pivotal Parameters Tuning method that enables the model to assimilate the new concept while preserving its original generative capabilities. Additionally, we identify a potential concept conflict when introducing multiple concepts into the pretrained model. We present a concept enhancement strategy to distinguish multiple concepts, enabling the fine-tuned model to generate music incorporating either individual or multiple concepts simultaneously. Since we are the first to work on the customized music generation task, we also introduce a new dataset and evaluation protocol for the new task. Our proposed Jen1-DreamStyler outperforms several baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Demos will be available at https://www.jenmusic.ai/research#DreamStyler.

We present a family of open-source Music Foundation Models designed to advance large-scale music understanding and generation across diverse tasks and modalities. Our framework consists of four major components: (1) HeartCLAP, an audio-text alignment model; (2) HeartTranscriptor, a robust lyric recognition model optimized for real-world music scenarios; and (3) HeartCodec, a low-frame-rate (12.5 Hz) yet high-fidelity music codec tokenizer that captures long-range musical structure while preserving fine-grained acoustic details and enabling efficient autoregressive modeling; (4) HeartMuLa, an LLM-based song generation model capable of synthesizing high-fidelity music under rich, user-controllable conditions (e.g., textual style descriptions, lyrics, and reference audio). In addition, it provides two specialized modes: (i) fine-grained musical attribute control, which allows users to specify the style of different song sections (e.g., intro, verse, chorus) using natural language prompts; and (ii) short, engaging music generation, which is suitable as background music for short videos. Lastly, HeartMuLa improves significantly when scaled to 7B parameters. For the first time, we show that a Suno-level, commercial-grade system can be reproduced using academic-scale data and GPU resources. We expect these foundation models to serve as strong baselines for future research and to facilitate practical applications in multimodal content production.

Guitar tablature transcription consists in deducing the string and the fret number on which each note should be played to reproduce the actual musical part. This assignment should lead to playable string-fret combinations throughout the entire track and, in general, preserve parsimonious motion between successive combinations. Throughout the history of guitar playing, specific chord fingerings have been developed across different musical styles that facilitate common idiomatic voicing combinations and motion between them. This paper presents a method for assigning guitar tablature notation to a given MIDI-based musical part (possibly consisting of multiple polyphonic tracks), i.e. no information about guitar-idiomatic expressional characteristics is involved (e.g. bending etc.) The current strategy is based on machine learning and requires a basic assumption about how much fingers can stretch on a fretboard; only standard 6-string guitar tuning is examined. The proposed method also examines the transcription of music pieces that was not meant to be played or could not possibly be played by a guitar (e.g. potentially a symphonic orchestra part), employing a rudimentary method for augmenting musical information and training/testing the system with artificial data. The results present interesting aspects about what the system can achieve when trained on the initial and augmented dataset, showing that the training with augmented data improves the performance even in simple, e.g. monophonic, cases. Results also indicate weaknesses and lead to useful conclusions about possible improvements.

In this work, we address the task of video background music generation. Some previous works achieve effective music generation but are unable to generate melodious music tailored to a particular video, and none of them considers the video-music rhythmic consistency. To generate the background music that matches the given video, we first establish the rhythmic relations between video and background music. In particular, we connect timing, motion speed, and motion saliency from video with beat, simu-note density, and simu-note strength from music, respectively. We then propose CMT, a Controllable Music Transformer that enables local control of the aforementioned rhythmic features and global control of the music genre and instruments. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the generated background music has achieved satisfactory compatibility with the input videos, and at the same time, impressive music quality. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wzk1015/video-bgm-generation.

A range of applications of multi-modal music information retrieval is centred around the problem of connecting large collections of sheet music (images) to corresponding audio recordings, that is, identifying pairs of audio and score excerpts that refer to the same musical content. One of the typical and most recent approaches to this task employs cross-modal deep learning architectures to learn joint embedding spaces that link the two distinct modalities - audio and sheet music images. While there has been steady improvement on this front over the past years, a number of open problems still prevent large-scale employment of this methodology. In this article we attempt to provide an insightful examination of the current developments on audio-sheet music retrieval via deep learning methods. We first identify a set of main challenges on the road towards robust and large-scale cross-modal music retrieval in real scenarios. We then highlight the steps we have taken so far to address some of these challenges, documenting step-by-step improvement along several dimensions. We conclude by analysing the remaining challenges and present ideas for solving these, in order to pave the way to a unified and robust methodology for cross-modal music retrieval.

In this paper, we address the challenge of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) for handwritten jazz lead sheets, a widely used musical score type that encodes melody and chords. The task is challenging due to the presence of chords, a score component not handled by existing OMR systems, and the high variability and quality issues associated with handwritten images. Our contribution is two-fold. We present a novel dataset consisting of 293 handwritten jazz lead sheets of 163 unique pieces, amounting to 2021 total staves aligned with Humdrum **kern and MusicXML ground truth scores. We also supply synthetic score images generated from the ground truth. The second contribution is the development of an OMR model for jazz lead sheets. We discuss specific tokenisation choices related to our kind of data, and the advantages of using synthetic scores and pretrained models. We publicly release all code, data, and models.

In this paper, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the pre-training of music. While the prevalent use of MIDI in music modeling is well-established, our findings suggest that LLMs are inherently more compatible with ABC Notation, which aligns more closely with their design and strengths, thereby enhancing the model's performance in musical composition. To address the challenges associated with misaligned measures from different tracks during generation, we propose the development of a Synchronized Multi-Track ABC Notation (SMT-ABC Notation), which aims to preserve coherence across multiple musical tracks. Our contributions include a series of models capable of handling up to 8192 tokens, covering 90\% of the symbolic music data in our training set. Furthermore, we explore the implications of the Symbolic Music Scaling Law (SMS Law) on model performance. The results indicate a promising direction for future research in music generation, offering extensive resources for community-led research through our open-source contributions.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) has been recognized as a key enabling technology with a wide range of applications. Given the task's complexity, best results have typically been reported for systems focusing on specific settings, e.g. instrument-specific systems tend to yield improved results over instrument-agnostic methods. Similarly, higher accuracy can be obtained when only estimating frame-wise f_0 values and neglecting the harder note event detection. Despite their high accuracy, such specialized systems often cannot be deployed in the real-world. Storage and network constraints prohibit the use of multiple specialized models, while memory and run-time constraints limit their complexity. In this paper, we propose a lightweight neural network for musical instrument transcription, which supports polyphonic outputs and generalizes to a wide variety of instruments (including vocals). Our model is trained to jointly predict frame-wise onsets, multipitch and note activations, and we experimentally show that this multi-output structure improves the resulting frame-level note accuracy. Despite its simplicity, benchmark results show our system's note estimation to be substantially better than a comparable baseline, and its frame-level accuracy to be only marginally below those of specialized state-of-the-art AMT systems. With this work we hope to encourage the community to further investigate low-resource, instrument-agnostic AMT systems.

We propose MelodySim, a melody-aware music similarity model and dataset for plagiarism detection. First, we introduce a novel method to construct a dataset with focus on melodic similarity. By augmenting Slakh2100; an existing MIDI dataset, we generate variations of each piece while preserving the melody through modifications such as note splitting, arpeggiation, minor track dropout (excluding bass), and re-instrumentation. A user study confirms that positive pairs indeed contain similar melodies, with other musical tracks significantly changed. Second, we develop a segment-wise melodic-similarity detection model that uses a MERT encoder and applies a triplet neural network to capture melodic similarity. The resultant decision matrix highlights where plagiarism might occur. Our model achieves high accuracy on the MelodySim test set.

Music datasets play a crucial role in advancing research in machine learning for music. However, existing music datasets suffer from limited size, accessibility, and lack of audio resources. To address these shortcomings, we present DISCO-10M, a novel and extensive music dataset that surpasses the largest previously available music dataset by an order of magnitude. To ensure high-quality data, we implement a multi-stage filtering process. This process incorporates similarities based on textual descriptions and audio embeddings. Moreover, we provide precomputed CLAP embeddings alongside DISCO-10M, facilitating direct application on various downstream tasks. These embeddings enable efficient exploration of machine learning applications on the provided data. With DISCO-10M, we aim to democratize and facilitate new research to help advance the development of novel machine learning models for music.

Recently, many methods based on deep learning have been proposed for music source separation. Some state-of-the-art methods have shown that stacking many layers with many skip connections improve the SDR performance. Although such a deep and complex architecture shows outstanding performance, it usually requires numerous computing resources and time for training and evaluation. This paper proposes a two-stream neural network for music demixing, called KUIELab-MDX-Net, which shows a good balance of performance and required resources. The proposed model has a time-frequency branch and a time-domain branch, where each branch separates stems, respectively. It blends results from two streams to generate the final estimation. KUIELab-MDX-Net took second place on leaderboard A and third place on leaderboard B in the Music Demixing Challenge at ISMIR 2021. This paper also summarizes experimental results on another benchmark, MUSDB18. Our source code is available online.

Multimodal models that jointly process audio and language hold great promise in audio understanding and are increasingly being adopted in the music domain. By allowing users to query via text and obtain information about a given audio input, these models have the potential to enable a variety of music understanding tasks via language-based interfaces. However, their evaluation poses considerable challenges, and it remains unclear how to effectively assess their ability to correctly interpret music-related inputs with current methods. Motivated by this, we introduce MuChoMusic, a benchmark for evaluating music understanding in multimodal language models focused on audio. MuChoMusic comprises 1,187 multiple-choice questions, all validated by human annotators, on 644 music tracks sourced from two publicly available music datasets, and covering a wide variety of genres. Questions in the benchmark are crafted to assess knowledge and reasoning abilities across several dimensions that cover fundamental musical concepts and their relation to cultural and functional contexts. Through the holistic analysis afforded by the benchmark, we evaluate five open-source models and identify several pitfalls, including an over-reliance on the language modality, pointing to a need for better multimodal integration. Data and code are open-sourced.

Music genre classification has been widely studied in past few years for its various applications in music information retrieval. Previous works tend to perform unsatisfactorily, since those methods only use audio content or jointly use audio content and lyrics content inefficiently. In addition, as genres normally co-occur in a music track, it is desirable to capture and model the genre correlations to improve the performance of multi-label music genre classification. To solve these issues, we present a novel multi-modal method leveraging audio-lyrics contrastive loss and two symmetric cross-modal attention, to align and fuse features from audio and lyrics. Furthermore, based on the nature of the multi-label classification, a genre correlations extraction module is presented to capture and model potential genre correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly surpasses other multi-label music genre classification methods and achieves state-of-the-art result on Music4All dataset.

Consistency models have exhibited remarkable capabilities in facilitating efficient image/video generation, enabling synthesis with minimal sampling steps. It has proven to be advantageous in mitigating the computational burdens associated with diffusion models. Nevertheless, the application of consistency models in music generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we present Music Consistency Models (MusicCM), which leverages the concept of consistency models to efficiently synthesize mel-spectrogram for music clips, maintaining high quality while minimizing the number of sampling steps. Building upon existing text-to-music diffusion models, the MusicCM model incorporates consistency distillation and adversarial discriminator training. Moreover, we find it beneficial to generate extended coherent music by incorporating multiple diffusion processes with shared constraints. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of our model in terms of computational efficiency, fidelity, and naturalness. Notable, MusicCM achieves seamless music synthesis with a mere four sampling steps, e.g., only one second per minute of the music clip, showcasing the potential for real-time application.

Despite deep learning's remarkable advances in style transfer across various domains, generating controllable performance-level musical style transfer for complete symbolically represented musical works remains a challenging area of research. Much of this is owed to limited datasets, especially for genres such as jazz, and the lack of unified models that can handle multiple music generation tasks. This paper presents ImprovNet, a transformer-based architecture that generates expressive and controllable musical improvisations through a self-supervised corruption-refinement training strategy. The improvisational style transfer is aimed at making meaningful modifications to one or more musical elements - melody, harmony or rhythm of the original composition with respect to the target genre. ImprovNet unifies multiple capabilities within a single model: it can perform cross-genre and intra-genre improvisations, harmonize melodies with genre-specific styles, and execute short prompt continuation and infilling tasks. The model's iterative generation framework allows users to control the degree of style transfer and structural similarity to the original composition. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate ImprovNet's effectiveness in generating musically coherent improvisations while maintaining structural relationships with the original pieces. The model outperforms Anticipatory Music Transformer in short continuation and infilling tasks and successfully achieves recognizable genre conversion, with 79\% of participants correctly identifying jazz-style improvisations of classical pieces. Our code and demo page can be found at https://github.com/keshavbhandari/improvnet.

Music performance synthesis aims to synthesize a musical score into a natural performance. In this paper, we borrow recent advances in text-to-speech synthesis and present the Deep Performer -- a novel system for score-to-audio music performance synthesis. Unlike speech, music often contains polyphony and long notes. Hence, we propose two new techniques for handling polyphonic inputs and providing a fine-grained conditioning in a transformer encoder-decoder model. To train our proposed system, we present a new violin dataset consisting of paired recordings and scores along with estimated alignments between them. We show that our proposed model can synthesize music with clear polyphony and harmonic structures. In a listening test, we achieve competitive quality against the baseline model, a conditional generative audio model, in terms of pitch accuracy, timbre and noise level. Moreover, our proposed model significantly outperforms the baseline on an existing piano dataset in overall quality.

This paper introduces effective design choices for text-to-music retrieval systems. An ideal text-based retrieval system would support various input queries such as pre-defined tags, unseen tags, and sentence-level descriptions. In reality, most previous works mainly focused on a single query type (tag or sentence) which may not generalize to another input type. Hence, we review recent text-based music retrieval systems using our proposed benchmark in two main aspects: input text representation and training objectives. Our findings enable a universal text-to-music retrieval system that achieves comparable retrieval performances in both tag- and sentence-level inputs. Furthermore, the proposed multimodal representation generalizes to 9 different downstream music classification tasks. We present the code and demo online.

In this work, we introduce the Sheet Music Benchmark (SMB), a dataset of six hundred and eighty-five pages specifically designed to benchmark Optical Music Recognition (OMR) research. SMB encompasses a diverse array of musical textures, including monophony, pianoform, quartet, and others, all encoded in Common Western Modern Notation using the Humdrum **kern format. Alongside SMB, we introduce the OMR Normalized Edit Distance (OMR-NED), a new metric tailored explicitly for evaluating OMR performance. OMR-NED builds upon the widely-used Symbol Error Rate (SER), offering a fine-grained and detailed error analysis that covers individual musical elements such as note heads, beams, pitches, accidentals, and other critical notation features. The resulting numeric score provided by OMR-NED facilitates clear comparisons, enabling researchers and end-users alike to identify optimal OMR approaches. Our work thus addresses a long-standing gap in OMR evaluation, and we support our contributions with baseline experiments using standardized SMB dataset splits for training and assessing state-of-the-art methods.

Music demixing is the task of separating different tracks from the given single audio signal into components, such as drums, bass, and vocals from the rest of the accompaniment. Separation of sources is useful for a range of areas, including entertainment and hearing aids. In this paper, we introduce two new benchmarks for the sound source separation tasks and compare popular models for sound demixing, as well as their ensembles, on these benchmarks. For the models' assessments, we provide the leaderboard at https://mvsep.com/quality_checker/, giving a comparison for a range of models. The new benchmark datasets are available for download. We also develop a novel approach for audio separation, based on the ensembling of different models that are suited best for the particular stem. The proposed solution was evaluated in the context of the Music Demixing Challenge 2023 and achieved top results in different tracks of the challenge. The code and the approach are open-sourced on GitHub.

Numerous studies in the field of music generation have demonstrated impressive performance, yet virtually no models are able to directly generate music to match accompanying videos. In this work, we develop a generative music AI framework, Video2Music, that can match a provided video. We first curated a unique collection of music videos. Then, we analysed the music videos to obtain semantic, scene offset, motion, and emotion features. These distinct features are then employed as guiding input to our music generation model. We transcribe the audio files into MIDI and chords, and extract features such as note density and loudness. This results in a rich multimodal dataset, called MuVi-Sync, on which we train a novel Affective Multimodal Transformer (AMT) model to generate music given a video. This model includes a novel mechanism to enforce affective similarity between video and music. Finally, post-processing is performed based on a biGRU-based regression model to estimate note density and loudness based on the video features. This ensures a dynamic rendering of the generated chords with varying rhythm and volume. In a thorough experiment, we show that our proposed framework can generate music that matches the video content in terms of emotion. The musical quality, along with the quality of music-video matching is confirmed in a user study. The proposed AMT model, along with the new MuVi-Sync dataset, presents a promising step for the new task of music generation for videos.

Instrument playing techniques (IPTs) constitute a pivotal component of musical expression. However, the development of automatic IPT detection methods suffers from limited labeled data and inherent class imbalance issues. In this paper, we propose to apply a self-supervised learning model pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled music data and finetune it on IPT detection tasks. This approach addresses data scarcity and class imbalance challenges. Recognizing the significance of pitch in capturing the nuances of IPTs and the importance of onset in locating IPT events, we investigate multi-task finetuning with pitch and onset detection as auxiliary tasks. Additionally, we apply a post-processing approach for event-level prediction, where an IPT activation initiates an event only if the onset output confirms an onset in that frame. Our method outperforms prior approaches in both frame-level and event-level metrics across multiple IPT benchmark datasets. Further experiments demonstrate the efficacy of multi-task finetuning on each IPT class.

In this work, we implement music production for silent film clips using LLM-driven method. Given the strong professional demands of film music production, we propose the FilmComposer, simulating the actual workflows of professional musicians. FilmComposer is the first to combine large generative models with a multi-agent approach, leveraging the advantages of both waveform music and symbolic music generation. Additionally, FilmComposer is the first to focus on the three core elements of music production for film-audio quality, musicality, and musical development-and introduces various controls, such as rhythm, semantics, and visuals, to enhance these key aspects. Specifically, FilmComposer consists of the visual processing module, rhythm-controllable MusicGen, and multi-agent assessment, arrangement and mix. In addition, our framework can seamlessly integrate into the actual music production pipeline and allows user intervention in every step, providing strong interactivity and a high degree of creative freedom. Furthermore, we propose MusicPro-7k which includes 7,418 film clips, music, description, rhythm spots and main melody, considering the lack of a professional and high-quality film music dataset. Finally, both the standard metrics and the new specialized metrics we propose demonstrate that the music generated by our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of quality, consistency with video, diversity, musicality, and musical development. Project page: https://apple-jun.github.io/FilmComposer.github.io/

The field of automatic music composition has seen great progress in recent years, specifically with the invention of transformer-based architectures. When using any deep learning model which considers music as a sequence of events with multiple complex dependencies, the selection of a proper data representation is crucial. In this paper, we tackle the task of conditional drums generation using a novel data encoding scheme inspired by the Compound Word representation, a tokenization process of sequential data. Therefore, we present a sequence-to-sequence architecture where a Bidirectional Long short-term memory (BiLSTM) Encoder receives information about the conditioning parameters (i.e., accompanying tracks and musical attributes), while a Transformer-based Decoder with relative global attention produces the generated drum sequences. We conducted experiments to thoroughly compare the effectiveness of our method to several baselines. Quantitative evaluation shows that our model is able to generate drums sequences that have similar statistical distributions and characteristics to the training corpus. These features include syncopation, compression ratio, and symmetry among others. We also verified, through a listening test, that generated drum sequences sound pleasant, natural and coherent while they "groove" with the given accompaniment.

We present a framework for learning to generate background music from video inputs. Unlike existing works that rely on symbolic musical annotations, which are limited in quantity and diversity, our method leverages large-scale web videos accompanied by background music. This enables our model to learn to generate realistic and diverse music. To accomplish this goal, we develop a generative video-music Transformer with a novel semantic video-music alignment scheme. Our model uses a joint autoregressive and contrastive learning objective, which encourages the generation of music aligned with high-level video content. We also introduce a novel video-beat alignment scheme to match the generated music beats with the low-level motions in the video. Lastly, to capture fine-grained visual cues in a video needed for realistic background music generation, we introduce a new temporal video encoder architecture, allowing us to efficiently process videos consisting of many densely sampled frames. We train our framework on our newly curated DISCO-MV dataset, consisting of 2.2M video-music samples, which is orders of magnitude larger than any prior datasets used for video music generation. Our method outperforms existing approaches on the DISCO-MV and MusicCaps datasets according to various music generation evaluation metrics, including human evaluation. Results are available at https://genjib.github.io/project_page/VMAs/index.html

Generating musical audio directly with neural networks is notoriously difficult because it requires coherently modeling structure at many different timescales. Fortunately, most music is also highly structured and can be represented as discrete note events played on musical instruments. Herein, we show that by using notes as an intermediate representation, we can train a suite of models capable of transcribing, composing, and synthesizing audio waveforms with coherent musical structure on timescales spanning six orders of magnitude (~0.1 ms to ~100 s), a process we call Wave2Midi2Wave. This large advance in the state of the art is enabled by our release of the new MAESTRO (MIDI and Audio Edited for Synchronous TRacks and Organization) dataset, composed of over 172 hours of virtuosic piano performances captured with fine alignment (~3 ms) between note labels and audio waveforms. The networks and the dataset together present a promising approach toward creating new expressive and interpretable neural models of music.

This paper approaches the problem of separating the notes from a quantized symbolic music piece (e.g., a MIDI file) into multiple voices and staves. This is a fundamental part of the larger task of music score engraving (or score typesetting), which aims to produce readable musical scores for human performers. We focus on piano music and support homophonic voices, i.e., voices that can contain chords, and cross-staff voices, which are notably difficult tasks that have often been overlooked in previous research. We propose an end-to-end system based on graph neural networks that clusters notes that belong to the same chord and connects them with edges if they are part of a voice. Our results show clear and consistent improvements over a previous approach on two datasets of different styles. To aid the qualitative analysis of our results, we support the export in symbolic music formats and provide a direct visualization of our outputs graph over the musical score. All code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/CPJKU/piano_svsep

We present Yambda-5B, a large-scale open dataset sourced from the Yandex.Music streaming platform. Yambda-5B contains 4.79 billion user-item interactions from 1 million users across 9.39 million tracks. The dataset includes two primary types of interactions: implicit feedback (listening events) and explicit feedback (likes, dislikes, unlikes and undislikes). In addition, we provide audio embeddings for most tracks, generated by a convolutional neural network trained on audio spectrograms. A key distinguishing feature of Yambda-5B is the inclusion of the is_organic flag, which separates organic user actions from recommendation-driven events. This distinction is critical for developing and evaluating machine learning algorithms, as Yandex.Music relies on recommender systems to personalize track selection for users. To support rigorous benchmarking, we introduce an evaluation protocol based on a Global Temporal Split, allowing recommendation algorithms to be assessed in conditions that closely mirror real-world use. We report benchmark results for standard baselines (ItemKNN, iALS) and advanced models (SANSA, SASRec) using a variety of evaluation metrics. By releasing Yambda-5B to the community, we aim to provide a readily accessible, industrial-scale resource to advance research, foster innovation, and promote reproducible results in recommender systems.

Symbolic music generation aims to create musical notes, which can help users compose music, such as generating target instrumental tracks from scratch, or based on user-provided source tracks. Considering the diverse and flexible combination between source and target tracks, a unified model capable of generating any arbitrary tracks is of crucial necessity. Previous works fail to address this need due to inherent constraints in music representations and model architectures. To address this need, we propose a unified representation and diffusion framework named GETMusic (`GET' stands for GEnerate music Tracks), which includes a novel music representation named GETScore, and a diffusion model named GETDiff. GETScore represents notes as tokens and organizes them in a 2D structure, with tracks stacked vertically and progressing horizontally over time. During training, tracks are randomly selected as either the target or source. In the forward process, target tracks are corrupted by masking their tokens, while source tracks remain as ground truth. In the denoising process, GETDiff learns to predict the masked target tokens, conditioning on the source tracks. With separate tracks in GETScore and the non-autoregressive behavior of the model, GETMusic can explicitly control the generation of any target tracks from scratch or conditioning on source tracks. We conduct experiments on music generation involving six instrumental tracks, resulting in a total of 665 combinations. GETMusic provides high-quality results across diverse combinations and surpasses prior works proposed for some specific combinations.

State-of-the-art end-to-end Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has, to date, primarily been carried out using monophonic transcription techniques to handle complex score layouts, such as polyphony, often by resorting to simplifications or specific adaptations. Despite their efficacy, these approaches imply challenges related to scalability and limitations. This paper presents the Sheet Music Transformer, the first end-to-end OMR model designed to transcribe complex musical scores without relying solely on monophonic strategies. Our model employs a Transformer-based image-to-sequence framework that predicts score transcriptions in a standard digital music encoding format from input images. Our model has been tested on two polyphonic music datasets and has proven capable of handling these intricate music structures effectively. The experimental outcomes not only indicate the competence of the model, but also show that it is better than the state-of-the-art methods, thus contributing to advancements in end-to-end OMR transcription.

In this report, we present our award-winning solutions for the Music Demixing Track of Sound Demixing Challenge 2023. First, we propose TFC-TDF-UNet v3, a time-efficient music source separation model that achieves state-of-the-art results on the MUSDB benchmark. We then give full details regarding our solutions for each Leaderboard, including a loss masking approach for noise-robust training. Code for reproducing model training and final submissions is available at github.com/kuielab/sdx23.

We propose MusicRL, the first music generation system finetuned from human feedback. Appreciation of text-to-music models is particularly subjective since the concept of musicality as well as the specific intention behind a caption are user-dependent (e.g. a caption such as "upbeat work-out music" can map to a retro guitar solo or a techno pop beat). Not only this makes supervised training of such models challenging, but it also calls for integrating continuous human feedback in their post-deployment finetuning. MusicRL is a pretrained autoregressive MusicLM (Agostinelli et al., 2023) model of discrete audio tokens finetuned with reinforcement learning to maximise sequence-level rewards. We design reward functions related specifically to text-adherence and audio quality with the help from selected raters, and use those to finetune MusicLM into MusicRL-R. We deploy MusicLM to users and collect a substantial dataset comprising 300,000 pairwise preferences. Using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), we train MusicRL-U, the first text-to-music model that incorporates human feedback at scale. Human evaluations show that both MusicRL-R and MusicRL-U are preferred to the baseline. Ultimately, MusicRL-RU combines the two approaches and results in the best model according to human raters. Ablation studies shed light on the musical attributes influencing human preferences, indicating that text adherence and quality only account for a part of it. This underscores the prevalence of subjectivity in musical appreciation and calls for further involvement of human listeners in the finetuning of music generation models.

Word embedding has become an essential means for text-based information retrieval. Typically, word embeddings are learned from large quantities of general and unstructured text data. However, in the domain of music, the word embedding may have difficulty understanding musical contexts or recognizing music-related entities like artists and tracks. To address this issue, we propose a new approach called Musical Word Embedding (MWE), which involves learning from various types of texts, including both everyday and music-related vocabulary. We integrate MWE into an audio-word joint representation framework for tagging and retrieving music, using words like tag, artist, and track that have different levels of musical specificity. Our experiments show that using a more specific musical word like track results in better retrieval performance, while using a less specific term like tag leads to better tagging performance. To balance this compromise, we suggest multi-prototype training that uses words with different levels of musical specificity jointly. We evaluate both word embedding and audio-word joint embedding on four tasks (tag rank prediction, music tagging, query-by-tag, and query-by-track) across two datasets (Million Song Dataset and MTG-Jamendo). Our findings show that the suggested MWE is more efficient and robust than the conventional word embedding.

We propose SpectroStream, a full-band multi-channel neural audio codec. Successor to the well-established SoundStream, SpectroStream extends its capability beyond 24 kHz monophonic audio and enables high-quality reconstruction of 48 kHz stereo music at bit rates of 4--16 kbps. This is accomplished with a new neural architecture that leverages audio representation in the time-frequency domain, which leads to better audio quality especially at higher sample rate. The model also uses a delayed-fusion strategy to handle multi-channel audio, which is crucial in balancing per-channel acoustic quality and cross-channel phase consistency.

Music two-tower multimodal systems integrate audio and text modalities into a joint audio-text space, enabling direct comparison between songs and their corresponding labels. These systems enable new approaches for classification and retrieval, leveraging both modalities. Despite the promising results they have shown for zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks, closer inspection of the embeddings is needed. This paper evaluates the inherent zero-shot properties of joint audio-text spaces for the case-study of instrument recognition. We present an evaluation and analysis of two-tower systems for zero-shot instrument recognition and a detailed analysis of the properties of the pre-joint and joint embeddings spaces. Our findings suggest that audio encoders alone demonstrate good quality, while challenges remain within the text encoder or joint space projection. Specifically, two-tower systems exhibit sensitivity towards specific words, favoring generic prompts over musically informed ones. Despite the large size of textual encoders, they do not yet leverage additional textual context or infer instruments accurately from their descriptions. Lastly, a novel approach for quantifying the semantic meaningfulness of the textual space leveraging an instrument ontology is proposed. This method reveals deficiencies in the systems' understanding of instruments and provides evidence of the need for fine-tuning text encoders on musical data.

The performance of music source separation (MSS) models has been greatly improved in recent years thanks to the development of novel neural network architectures and training pipelines. However, recent model designs for MSS were mainly motivated by other audio processing tasks or other research fields, while the intrinsic characteristics and patterns of the music signals were not fully discovered. In this paper, we propose band-split RNN (BSRNN), a frequency-domain model that explictly splits the spectrogram of the mixture into subbands and perform interleaved band-level and sequence-level modeling. The choices of the bandwidths of the subbands can be determined by a priori knowledge or expert knowledge on the characteristics of the target source in order to optimize the performance on a certain type of target musical instrument. To better make use of unlabeled data, we also describe a semi-supervised model finetuning pipeline that can further improve the performance of the model. Experiment results show that BSRNN trained only on MUSDB18-HQ dataset significantly outperforms several top-ranking models in Music Demixing (MDX) Challenge 2021, and the semi-supervised finetuning stage further improves the performance on all four instrument tracks.

Evaluating song aesthetics is challenging due to the multidimensional nature of musical perception and the scarcity of labeled data. We propose HEAR, a robust music aesthetic evaluation framework that combines: (1) a multi-source multi-scale representations module to obtain complementary segment- and track-level features, (2) a hierarchical augmentation strategy to mitigate overfitting, and (3) a hybrid training objective that integrates regression and ranking losses for accurate scoring and reliable top-tier song identification. Experiments demonstrate that HEAR consistently outperforms the baseline across all metrics on both tracks of the ICASSP 2026 SongEval benchmark. The code and trained model weights are available at https://github.com/Eps-Acoustic-Revolution-Lab/EAR_HEAR.

Despite progress in controllable symbolic music generation, data scarcity remains a challenge for certain control modalities. Composer-style music generation is a prime example, as only a few pieces per composer are available, limiting the modeling of both styles and fundamental music elements (e.g., melody, chord, rhythm). In this paper, we investigate how general music knowledge learned from a broad corpus can enhance the mastery of specific composer styles, with a focus on piano piece generation. Our approach follows a two-stage training paradigm. First, we pre-train a REMI-based music generation model on a large corpus of pop, folk, and classical music. Then, we fine-tune it on a small, human-verified dataset from four renowned composers, namely Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, using a lightweight adapter module to condition the model on style indicators. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct both objective and subjective evaluations on style accuracy and musicality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms ablations and baselines, achieving more precise composer-style modeling and better musical aesthetics. Additionally, we provide observations on how the model builds music concepts from the generality pre-training and refines its stylistic understanding through the mastery fine-tuning.

Evaluation of text-to-music systems is constrained by the cost and availability of collecting experts for assessment. AudioMOS 2025 Challenge track 1 is created to automatically predict music impression (MI) as well as text alignment (TA) between the prompt and the generated musical piece. This paper reports our winning system, which uses a dual-branch architecture with pre-trained MuQ and RoBERTa models as audio and text encoders. A cross-attention mechanism fuses the audio and text representations. For training, we reframe the MI and TA prediction as a classification task. To incorporate the ordinal nature of MOS scores, one-hot labels are converted to a soft distribution using a Gaussian kernel. On the official test set, a single model trained with this method achieves a system-level Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient (SRCC) of 0.991 for MI and 0.952 for TA, corresponding to a relative improvement of 21.21\% in MI SRCC and 31.47\% in TA SRCC over the challenge baseline.

This paper presents the Jazz Transformer, a generative model that utilizes a neural sequence model called the Transformer-XL for modeling lead sheets of Jazz music. Moreover, the model endeavors to incorporate structural events present in the Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) for inducing structures in the generated music. While we are able to reduce the training loss to a low value, our listening test suggests however a clear gap between the average ratings of the generated and real compositions. We therefore go one step further and conduct a series of computational analysis of the generated compositions from different perspectives. This includes analyzing the statistics of the pitch class, grooving, and chord progression, assessing the structureness of the music with the help of the fitness scape plot, and evaluating the model's understanding of Jazz music through a MIREX-like continuation prediction task. Our work presents in an analytical manner why machine-generated music to date still falls short of the artwork of humanity, and sets some goals for future work on automatic composition to further pursue.

We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff". MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.

Subword tokenization has been widely successful in text-based natural language processing (NLP) tasks with Transformer-based models. As Transformer models become increasingly popular in symbolic music-related studies, it is imperative to investigate the efficacy of subword tokenization in the symbolic music domain. In this paper, we explore subword tokenization techniques, such as byte-pair encoding (BPE), in symbolic music generation and its impact on the overall structure of generated songs. Our experiments are based on three types of MIDI datasets: single track-melody only, multi-track with a single instrument, and multi-track and multi-instrument. We apply subword tokenization on post-musical tokenization schemes and find that it enables the generation of longer songs at the same time and improves the overall structure of the generated music in terms of objective metrics like structure indicator (SI), Pitch Class Entropy, etc. We also compare two subword tokenization methods, BPE and Unigram, and observe that both methods lead to consistent improvements. Our study suggests that subword tokenization is a promising technique for symbolic music generation and may have broader implications for music composition, particularly in cases involving complex data such as multi-track songs.

Multi-modal deep learning techniques for matching free-form text with music have shown promising results in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Prior work is often based on large proprietary data while publicly available datasets are few and small in size. In this study, we present WikiMuTe, a new and open dataset containing rich semantic descriptions of music. The data is sourced from Wikipedia's rich catalogue of articles covering musical works. Using a dedicated text-mining pipeline, we extract both long and short-form descriptions covering a wide range of topics related to music content such as genre, style, mood, instrumentation, and tempo. To show the use of this data, we train a model that jointly learns text and audio representations and performs cross-modal retrieval. The model is evaluated on two tasks: tag-based music retrieval and music auto-tagging. The results show that while our approach has state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks, but still observe a difference in performance depending on the data used for training.

Previous studies on music style transfer have mainly focused on one-to-one style conversion, which is relatively limited. When considering the conversion between multiple styles, previous methods required designing multiple modes to disentangle the complex style of the music, resulting in large computational costs and slow audio generation. The existing music style transfer methods generate spectrograms with artifacts, leading to significant noise in the generated audio. To address these issues, this study proposes a music style transfer framework based on diffusion models (DM) and uses spectrogram-based methods to achieve multi-to-multi music style transfer. The GuideDiff method is used to restore spectrograms to high-fidelity audio, accelerating audio generation speed and reducing noise in the generated audio. Experimental results show that our model has good performance in multi-mode music style transfer compared to the baseline and can generate high-quality audio in real-time on consumer-grade GPUs.

In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of AI music generation tools, including both research projects and commercialized applications. To conduct our analysis, we classified music generation approaches into three categories: parameter-based, text-based, and visual-based classes. Our survey highlights the diverse possibilities and functional features of these tools, which cater to a wide range of users, from regular listeners to professional musicians. We observed that each tool has its own set of advantages and limitations. As a result, we have compiled a comprehensive list of these factors that should be considered during the tool selection process. Moreover, our survey offers critical insights into the underlying mechanisms and challenges of AI music generation.

We present JASCO, a temporally controlled text-to-music generation model utilizing both symbolic and audio-based conditions. JASCO can generate high-quality music samples conditioned on global text descriptions along with fine-grained local controls. JASCO is based on the Flow Matching modeling paradigm together with a novel conditioning method. This allows music generation controlled both locally (e.g., chords) and globally (text description). Specifically, we apply information bottleneck layers in conjunction with temporal blurring to extract relevant information with respect to specific controls. This allows the incorporation of both symbolic and audio-based conditions in the same text-to-music model. We experiment with various symbolic control signals (e.g., chords, melody), as well as with audio representations (e.g., separated drum tracks, full-mix). We evaluate JASCO considering both generation quality and condition adherence, using both objective metrics and human studies. Results suggest that JASCO is comparable to the evaluated baselines considering generation quality while allowing significantly better and more versatile controls over the generated music. Samples are available on our demo page https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/JASCO.

With recent advancements in text-to-audio and text-to-music based on latent diffusion models, the quality of generated content has been reaching new heights. The controllability of musical aspects, however, has not been explicitly explored in text-to-music systems yet. In this paper, we present Mustango, a music-domain-knowledge-inspired text-to-music system based on diffusion, that expands the Tango text-to-audio model. Mustango aims to control the generated music, not only with general text captions, but from more rich captions that could include specific instructions related to chords, beats, tempo, and key. As part of Mustango, we propose MuNet, a Music-Domain-Knowledge-Informed UNet sub-module to integrate these music-specific features, which we predict from the text prompt, as well as the general text embedding, into the diffusion denoising process. To overcome the limited availability of open datasets of music with text captions, we propose a novel data augmentation method that includes altering the harmonic, rhythmic, and dynamic aspects of music audio and using state-of-the-art Music Information Retrieval methods to extract the music features which will then be appended to the existing descriptions in text format. We release the resulting MusicBench dataset which contains over 52K instances and includes music-theory-based descriptions in the caption text. Through extensive experiments, we show that the quality of the music generated by Mustango is state-of-the-art, and the controllability through music-specific text prompts greatly outperforms other models in terms of desired chords, beat, key, and tempo, on multiple datasets.

This paper introduces an extendable modular system that compiles a range of music feature extraction models to aid music information retrieval research. The features include musical elements like key, downbeats, and genre, as well as audio characteristics like instrument recognition, vocals/instrumental classification, and vocals gender detection. The integrated models are state-of-the-art or latest open-source. The features can be extracted as latent or post-processed labels, enabling integration into music applications such as generative music, recommendation, and playlist generation. The modular design allows easy integration of newly developed systems, making it a good benchmarking and comparison tool. This versatile toolkit supports the research community in developing innovative solutions by providing concrete musical features.

Recent advancements in music large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved music understanding tasks, which involve the model's ability to analyze and interpret various musical elements. These improvements primarily focused on integrating both music and text inputs. However, the potential of incorporating additional modalities such as images, videos and textual music features to enhance music understanding remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose DeepResonance, a multimodal music understanding LLM fine-tuned via multi-way instruction tuning with multi-way aligned music, text, image, and video data. To this end, we construct Music4way-MI2T, Music4way-MV2T, and Music4way-Any2T, three 4-way training and evaluation datasets designed to enable DeepResonance to integrate both visual and textual music feature content. We also introduce multi-sampled ImageBind embeddings and a pre-LLM fusion Transformer to enhance modality fusion prior to input into text LLMs, tailoring DeepResonance for multi-way instruction tuning. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances across six music understanding tasks, highlighting the benefits of the auxiliary modalities and the structural superiority of DeepResonance. We plan to open-source the models and the newly constructed datasets.

Playlists have become a significant part of our listening experience because of the digital cloud-based services such as Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music. Owing to the meteoric rise in the usage of playlists, recommending playlists is crucial to music services today. Although there has been a lot of work done in playlist prediction, the area of playlist representation hasn't received that level of attention. Over the last few years, sequence-to-sequence models, especially in the field of natural language processing, have shown the effectiveness of learned embeddings in capturing the semantic characteristics of sequences. We can apply similar concepts to music to learn fixed length representations for playlists and use those representations for downstream tasks such as playlist discovery, browsing, and recommendation. In this work, we formulate the problem of learning a fixed-length playlist representation in an unsupervised manner, using Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2seq) models, interpreting playlists as sentences and songs as words. We compare our model with two other encoding architectures for baseline comparison. We evaluate our work using the suite of tasks commonly used for assessing sentence embeddings, along with a few additional tasks pertaining to music, and a recommendation task to study the traits captured by the playlist embeddings and their effectiveness for the purpose of music recommendation.

Recent progress in text-to-music generation has enabled models to synthesize high-quality musical segments, full compositions, and even respond to fine-grained control signals, e.g. chord progressions. State-of-the-art (SOTA) systems differ significantly across many dimensions, such as training datasets, modeling paradigms, and architectural choices. This diversity complicates efforts to evaluate models fairly and pinpoint which design choices most influence performance. While factors like data and architecture are important, in this study we focus exclusively on the modeling paradigm. We conduct a systematic empirical analysis to isolate its effects, offering insights into associated trade-offs and emergent behaviors that can guide future text-to-music generation systems. Specifically, we compare the two arguably most common modeling paradigms: Auto-Regressive decoding and Conditional Flow-Matching. We conduct a controlled comparison by training all models from scratch using identical datasets, training configurations, and similar backbone architectures. Performance is evaluated across multiple axes, including generation quality, robustness to inference configurations, scalability, adherence to both textual and temporally aligned conditioning, and editing capabilities in the form of audio inpainting. This comparative study sheds light on distinct strengths and limitations of each paradigm, providing actionable insights that can inform future architectural and training decisions in the evolving landscape of text-to-music generation. Audio sampled examples are available at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ortal1602/ARvsFM

Digital advances have transformed the face of automatic music generation since its beginnings at the dawn of computing. Despite the many breakthroughs, issues such as the musical tasks targeted by different machines and the degree to which they succeed remain open questions. We present a functional taxonomy for music generation systems with reference to existing systems. The taxonomy organizes systems according to the purposes for which they were designed. It also reveals the inter-relatedness amongst the systems. This design-centered approach contrasts with predominant methods-based surveys and facilitates the identification of grand challenges to set the stage for new breakthroughs.

We consider the problem of generating musical soundtracks in sync with rhythmic visual cues. Most existing works rely on pre-defined music representations, leading to the incompetence of generative flexibility and complexity. Other methods directly generating video-conditioned waveforms suffer from limited scenarios, short lengths, and unstable generation quality. To this end, we present Long-Term Rhythmic Video Soundtracker (LORIS), a novel framework to synthesize long-term conditional waveforms. Specifically, our framework consists of a latent conditional diffusion probabilistic model to perform waveform synthesis. Furthermore, a series of context-aware conditioning encoders are proposed to take temporal information into consideration for a long-term generation. Notably, we extend our model's applicability from dances to multiple sports scenarios such as floor exercise and figure skating. To perform comprehensive evaluations, we establish a benchmark for rhythmic video soundtracks including the pre-processed dataset, improved evaluation metrics, and robust generative baselines. Extensive experiments show that our model generates long-term soundtracks with state-of-the-art musical quality and rhythmic correspondence. Codes are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/LORIS.

The aim of this work is to define a model based on deep learning that is able to identify different instrument timbres with as few parameters as possible. For this purpose, we have worked with classical orchestral instruments played with different dynamics, which are part of a few instrument families and which play notes in the same pitch range. It has been possible to assess the ability to classify instruments by timbre even if the instruments are playing the same note with the same intensity. The network employed uses a multi-head attention mechanism, with 8 heads and a dense network at the output taking as input the log-mel magnitude spectrograms of the sound samples. This network allows the identification of 20 instrument classes of the classical orchestra, achieving an overall F_1 value of 0.62. An analysis of the weights of the attention layer has been performed and the confusion matrix of the model is presented, allowing us to assess the ability of the proposed architecture to distinguish timbre and to establish the aspects on which future work should focus.

We propose a new graph convolutional block, called MusGConv, specifically designed for the efficient processing of musical score data and motivated by general perceptual principles. It focuses on two fundamental dimensions of music, pitch and rhythm, and considers both relative and absolute representations of these components. We evaluate our approach on four different musical understanding problems: monophonic voice separation, harmonic analysis, cadence detection, and composer identification which, in abstract terms, translate to different graph learning problems, namely, node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. Our experiments demonstrate that MusGConv improves the performance on three of the aforementioned tasks while being conceptually very simple and efficient. We interpret this as evidence that it is beneficial to include perception-informed processing of fundamental musical concepts when developing graph network applications on musical score data.

The field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is fragmented, with specialized models excelling at isolated tasks. In this work, we challenge this paradigm by introducing a unified foundation model named MuFun for holistic music understanding. Our model features a novel architecture that jointly processes instrumental and lyrical content, and is trained on a large-scale dataset covering diverse tasks such as genre classification, music tagging, and question answering. To facilitate robust evaluation, we also propose a new benchmark for multi-faceted music understanding called MuCUE (Music Comprehensive Understanding Evaluation). Experiments show our model significantly outperforms existing audio large language models across the MuCUE tasks, demonstrating its state-of-the-art effectiveness and generalization ability.

When used with deep learning, the symbolic music modality is often coupled with language model architectures. To do so, the music needs to be tokenized, i.e. converted into a sequence of discrete tokens. This can be achieved by different approaches, as music can be composed of simultaneous tracks, of simultaneous notes with several attributes. Until now, the proposed tokenizations rely on small vocabularies of tokens describing the note attributes and time events, resulting in fairly long token sequences, and a sub-optimal use of the embedding space of language models. Recent research has put efforts on reducing the overall sequence length by merging embeddings or combining tokens. In this paper, we show that Byte Pair Encoding, a compression technique widely used for natural language, significantly decreases the sequence length while increasing the vocabulary size. By doing so, we leverage the embedding capabilities of such models with more expressive tokens, resulting in both better results and faster inference in generation and classification tasks. The source code is shared on Github, along with a companion website. Finally, BPE is directly implemented in MidiTok, allowing the reader to easily benefit from this method.

Generating high quality music that complements the visual content of a video is a challenging task. Most existing visual conditioned music generation systems generate symbolic music data, such as MIDI files, instead of raw audio waveform. Given the limited availability of symbolic music data, such methods can only generate music for a few instruments or for specific types of visual input. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called V2Meow that can generate high-quality music audio that aligns well with the visual semantics of a diverse range of video input types. Specifically, the proposed music generation system is a multi-stage autoregressive model which is trained with a number of O(100K) music audio clips paired with video frames, which are mined from in-the-wild music videos, and no parallel symbolic music data is involved. V2Meow is able to synthesize high-fidelity music audio waveform solely conditioned on pre-trained visual features extracted from an arbitrary silent video clip, and it also allows high-level control over the music style of generation examples via supporting text prompts in addition to the video frames conditioning. Through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that our model outperforms several existing music generation systems in terms of both visual-audio correspondence and audio quality.

Sound content is an indispensable element for multimedia works such as video games, music, and films. Recent high-quality diffusion-based sound generation models can serve as valuable tools for the creators. However, despite producing high-quality sounds, these models often suffer from slow inference speeds. This drawback burdens creators, who typically refine their sounds through trial and error to align them with their artistic intentions. To address this issue, we introduce Sound Consistency Trajectory Models (SoundCTM). Our model enables flexible transitioning between high-quality 1-step sound generation and superior sound quality through multi-step generation. This allows creators to initially control sounds with 1-step samples before refining them through multi-step generation. While CTM fundamentally achieves flexible 1-step and multi-step generation, its impressive performance heavily depends on an additional pretrained feature extractor and an adversarial loss, which are expensive to train and not always available in other domains. Thus, we reframe CTM's training framework and introduce a novel feature distance by utilizing the teacher's network for a distillation loss. Additionally, while distilling classifier-free guided trajectories, we train conditional and unconditional student models simultaneously and interpolate between these models during inference. We also propose training-free controllable frameworks for SoundCTM, leveraging its flexible sampling capability. SoundCTM achieves both promising 1-step and multi-step real-time sound generation without using any extra off-the-shelf networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate SoundCTM's capability of controllable sound generation in a training-free manner.

The lack of data tends to limit the outcomes of deep learning research, particularly when dealing with end-to-end learning stacks processing raw data such as waveforms. In this study, 1.2M tracks annotated with musical labels are available to train our end-to-end models. This large amount of data allows us to unrestrictedly explore two different design paradigms for music auto-tagging: assumption-free models - using waveforms as input with very small convolutional filters; and models that rely on domain knowledge - log-mel spectrograms with a convolutional neural network designed to learn timbral and temporal features. Our work focuses on studying how these two types of deep architectures perform when datasets of variable size are available for training: the MagnaTagATune (25k songs), the Million Song Dataset (240k songs), and a private dataset of 1.2M songs. Our experiments suggest that music domain assumptions are relevant when not enough training data are available, thus showing how waveform-based models outperform spectrogram-based ones in large-scale data scenarios.

Recently, symbolic music generation has become a focus of numerous deep learning research. Structure as an important part of music, contributes to improving the quality of music, and an increasing number of works start to study the hierarchical structure. In this study, we delve into the multi-level structures within music from macro-level and micro-level hierarchies. At the macro-level hierarchy, we conduct phrase segmentation algorithm to explore how phrases influence the overall development of music, and at the micro-level hierarchy, we design skeleton notes extraction strategy to explore how skeleton notes within each phrase guide the melody generation. Furthermore, we propose a novel Phrase-level Cross-Attention mechanism to capture the intrinsic relationship between macro-level hierarchy and micro-level hierarchy. Moreover, in response to the current lack of research on Chinese-style music, we construct our Small Tunes Dataset: a substantial collection of MIDI files comprising 10088 Small Tunes, a category of traditional Chinese Folk Songs. This dataset serves as the focus of our study. We generate Small Tunes songs utilizing the extracted skeleton notes as conditions, and experiment results indicate that our proposed model, Small Tunes Transformer, outperforms other state-of-the-art models. Besides, we design three novel objective evaluation metrics to evaluate music from both rhythm and melody dimensions.

Composing music for video is essential yet challenging, leading to a growing interest in automating music generation for video applications. Existing approaches often struggle to achieve robust music-video correspondence and generative diversity, primarily due to inadequate feature alignment methods and insufficient datasets. In this study, we present General Video-to-Music Generation model (GVMGen), designed for generating high-related music to the video input. Our model employs hierarchical attentions to extract and align video features with music in both spatial and temporal dimensions, ensuring the preservation of pertinent features while minimizing redundancy. Remarkably, our method is versatile, capable of generating multi-style music from different video inputs, even in zero-shot scenarios. We also propose an evaluation model along with two novel objective metrics for assessing video-music alignment. Additionally, we have compiled a large-scale dataset comprising diverse types of video-music pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that GVMGen surpasses previous models in terms of music-video correspondence, generative diversity, and application universality.

In this work, we systematically study music generation conditioned solely on the video. First, we present a large-scale dataset comprising 360K video-music pairs, including various genres such as movie trailers, advertisements, and documentaries. Furthermore, we propose VidMuse, a simple framework for generating music aligned with video inputs. VidMuse stands out by producing high-fidelity music that is both acoustically and semantically aligned with the video. By incorporating local and global visual cues, VidMuse enables the creation of musically coherent audio tracks that consistently match the video content through Long-Short-Term modeling. Through extensive experiments, VidMuse outperforms existing models in terms of audio quality, diversity, and audio-visual alignment. The code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/ZeyueT/VidMuse/.

We present a method for simultaneously localizing multiple sound sources within a visual scene. This task requires a model to both group a sound mixture into individual sources, and to associate them with a visual signal. Our method jointly solves both tasks at once, using a formulation inspired by the contrastive random walk of Jabri et al. We create a graph in which images and separated sounds correspond to nodes, and train a random walker to transition between nodes from different modalities with high return probability. The transition probabilities for this walk are determined by an audio-visual similarity metric that is learned by our model. We show through experiments with musical instruments and human speech that our model can successfully localize multiple sounds, outperforming other self-supervised methods. Project site: https://hxixixh.github.io/mix-and-localize

We present Dance2Music-GAN (D2M-GAN), a novel adversarial multi-modal framework that generates complex musical samples conditioned on dance videos. Our proposed framework takes dance video frames and human body motions as input, and learns to generate music samples that plausibly accompany the corresponding input. Unlike most existing conditional music generation works that generate specific types of mono-instrumental sounds using symbolic audio representations (e.g., MIDI), and that usually rely on pre-defined musical synthesizers, in this work we generate dance music in complex styles (e.g., pop, breaking, etc.) by employing a Vector Quantized (VQ) audio representation, and leverage both its generality and high abstraction capacity of its symbolic and continuous counterparts. By performing an extensive set of experiments on multiple datasets, and following a comprehensive evaluation protocol, we assess the generative qualities of our proposal against alternatives. The attained quantitative results, which measure the music consistency, beats correspondence, and music diversity, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Last but not least, we curate a challenging dance-music dataset of in-the-wild TikTok videos, which we use to further demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in real-world applications -- and which we hope to serve as a starting point for relevant future research.

Multimodality-to-Multiaudio (MM2MA) generation faces significant challenges in synthesizing diverse and contextually aligned audio types (e.g., sound effects, speech, music, and songs) from multimodal inputs (e.g., video, text, images), owing to the scarcity of high-quality paired datasets and the lack of robust multi-task learning frameworks. Recently, multi-agent system shows great potential in tackling the above issues. However, directly applying it to MM2MA task presents three critical challenges: (1) inadequate fine-grained understanding of multimodal inputs (especially for video), (2) the inability of single models to handle diverse audio events, and (3) the absence of self-correction mechanisms for reliable outputs. To this end, we propose AudioGenie, a novel training-free multi-agent system featuring a dual-layer architecture with a generation team and a supervisor team. For the generation team, a fine-grained task decomposition and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) collaborative entity are designed for dynamic model selection, and a trial-and-error iterative refinement module is designed for self-correction. The supervisor team ensures temporal-spatial consistency and verifies outputs through feedback loops. Moreover, we build MA-Bench, the first benchmark for MM2MA tasks, comprising 198 annotated videos with multi-type audios. Experiments demonstrate that our AudioGenie outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across 9 metrics in 8 tasks. User study further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of quality, accuracy, alignment, and aesthetic. The anonymous project website with samples can be found at https://audiogenie.github.io/.

Text-to-music generation models are now capable of generating high-quality music audio in broad styles. However, text control is primarily suitable for the manipulation of global musical attributes like genre, mood, and tempo, and is less suitable for precise control over time-varying attributes such as the positions of beats in time or the changing dynamics of the music. We propose Music ControlNet, a diffusion-based music generation model that offers multiple precise, time-varying controls over generated audio. To imbue text-to-music models with time-varying control, we propose an approach analogous to pixel-wise control of the image-domain ControlNet method. Specifically, we extract controls from training audio yielding paired data, and fine-tune a diffusion-based conditional generative model over audio spectrograms given melody, dynamics, and rhythm controls. While the image-domain Uni-ControlNet method already allows generation with any subset of controls, we devise a new strategy to allow creators to input controls that are only partially specified in time. We evaluate both on controls extracted from audio and controls we expect creators to provide, demonstrating that we can generate realistic music that corresponds to control inputs in both settings. While few comparable music generation models exist, we benchmark against MusicGen, a recent model that accepts text and melody input, and show that our model generates music that is 49% more faithful to input melodies despite having 35x fewer parameters, training on 11x less data, and enabling two additional forms of time-varying control. Sound examples can be found at https://MusicControlNet.github.io/web/.

The rise of deep learning technologies has quickly advanced many fields, including that of generative music systems. There exist a number of systems that allow for the generation of good sounding short snippets, yet, these generated snippets often lack an overarching, longer-term structure. In this work, we propose CM-HRNN: a conditional melody generation model based on a hierarchical recurrent neural network. This model allows us to generate melodies with long-term structures based on given chord accompaniments. We also propose a novel, concise event-based representation to encode musical lead sheets while retaining the notes' relative position within the bar with respect to the musical meter. With this new data representation, the proposed architecture can simultaneously model the rhythmic, as well as the pitch structures in an effective way. Melodies generated by the proposed model were extensively evaluated in quantitative experiments as well as a user study to ensure the musical quality of the output as well as to evaluate if they contain repeating patterns. We also compared the system with the state-of-the-art AttentionRNN. This comparison shows that melodies generated by CM-HRNN contain more repeated patterns (i.e., higher compression ratio) and a lower tonal tension (i.e., more tonally concise). Results from our listening test indicate that CM-HRNN outperforms AttentionRNN in terms of long-term structure and overall rating.

Recent years have witnessed the success of foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) in various music informatics understanding tasks, including music tagging, instrument classification, key detection, and more. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised music representation learning model for music understanding. Distinguished from previous studies adopting random projection or existing neural codec, the proposed model, named MuQ, is trained to predict tokens generated by Mel Residual Vector Quantization (Mel-RVQ). Our Mel-RVQ utilizes residual linear projection structure for Mel spectrum quantization to enhance the stability and efficiency of target extraction and lead to better performance. Experiments in a large variety of downstream tasks demonstrate that MuQ outperforms previous self-supervised music representation models with only 0.9K hours of open-source pre-training data. Scaling up the data to over 160K hours and adopting iterative training consistently improve the model performance. To further validate the strength of our model, we present MuQ-MuLan, a joint music-text embedding model based on contrastive learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot music tagging task on the MagnaTagATune dataset. Code and checkpoints are open source in https://github.com/tencent-ailab/MuQ.

Learning musical structures and composition patterns is necessary for both music generation and understanding, but current methods do not make uniform use of learned features to generate and comprehend music simultaneously. In this paper, we propose PianoBART, a pre-trained model that uses BART for both symbolic piano music generation and understanding. We devise a multi-level object selection strategy for different pre-training tasks of PianoBART, which can prevent information leakage or loss and enhance learning ability. The musical semantics captured in pre-training are fine-tuned for music generation and understanding tasks. Experiments demonstrate that PianoBART efficiently learns musical patterns and achieves outstanding performance in generating high-quality coherent pieces and comprehending music. Our code and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/RS2002/PianoBart.

We have built a music similarity search engine that lets video producers search by listenable music excerpts, as a complement to traditional full-text search. Our system suggests similar sounding track segments in a large music catalog by training a self-supervised convolutional neural network with triplet loss terms and musical transformations. Semi-structured user interviews demonstrate that we can successfully impress professional video producers with the quality of the search experience, and perceived similarities to query tracks averaged 7.8/10 in user testing. We believe this search tool will make for a more natural search experience that is easier to find music to soundtrack videos with.

Automatic music transcription (AMT) is the task of transcribing audio recordings into symbolic representations. Recently, neural network-based methods have been applied to AMT, and have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, many previous systems only detect the onset and offset of notes frame-wise, so the transcription resolution is limited to the frame hop size. There is a lack of research on using different strategies to encode onset and offset targets for training. In addition, previous AMT systems are sensitive to the misaligned onset and offset labels of audio recordings. Furthermore, there are limited researches on sustain pedal transcription on large-scale datasets. In this article, we propose a high-resolution AMT system trained by regressing precise onset and offset times of piano notes. At inference, we propose an algorithm to analytically calculate the precise onset and offset times of piano notes and pedal events. We show that our AMT system is robust to the misaligned onset and offset labels compared to previous systems. Our proposed system achieves an onset F1 of 96.72% on the MAESTRO dataset, outperforming previous onsets and frames system of 94.80%. Our system achieves a pedal onset F1 score of 91.86\%, which is the first benchmark result on the MAESTRO dataset. We have released the source code and checkpoints of our work at https://github.com/bytedance/piano_transcription.

Instrument playing technique (IPT) is a key element of musical presentation. However, most of the existing works for IPT detection only concern monophonic music signals, yet little has been done to detect IPTs in polyphonic instrumental solo pieces with overlapping IPTs or mixed IPTs. In this paper, we formulate it as a frame-level multi-label classification problem and apply it to Guzheng, a Chinese plucked string instrument. We create a new dataset, Guzheng\_Tech99, containing Guzheng recordings and onset, offset, pitch, IPT annotations of each note. Because different IPTs vary a lot in their lengths, we propose a new method to solve this problem using multi-scale network and self-attention. The multi-scale network extracts features from different scales, and the self-attention mechanism applied to the feature maps at the coarsest scale further enhances the long-range feature extraction. Our approach outperforms existing works by a large margin, indicating its effectiveness in IPT detection.

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), introduced in 1983, revolutionized music production by allowing computers and instruments to communicate efficiently. MIDI files encode musical instructions compactly, facilitating convenient music sharing. They benefit Music Information Retrieval (MIR), aiding in research on music understanding, computational musicology, and generative music. The GigaMIDI dataset contains over 1.4 million unique MIDI files, encompassing 1.8 billion MIDI note events and over 5.3 million MIDI tracks. GigaMIDI is currently the largest collection of symbolic music in MIDI format available for research purposes under fair dealing. Distinguishing between non-expressive and expressive MIDI tracks is challenging, as MIDI files do not inherently make this distinction. To address this issue, we introduce a set of innovative heuristics for detecting expressive music performance. These include the Distinctive Note Velocity Ratio (DNVR) heuristic, which analyzes MIDI note velocity; the Distinctive Note Onset Deviation Ratio (DNODR) heuristic, which examines deviations in note onset times; and the Note Onset Median Metric Level (NOMML) heuristic, which evaluates onset positions relative to metric levels. Our evaluation demonstrates these heuristics effectively differentiate between non-expressive and expressive MIDI tracks. Furthermore, after evaluation, we create the most substantial expressive MIDI dataset, employing our heuristic, NOMML. This curated iteration of GigaMIDI encompasses expressively-performed instrument tracks detected by NOMML, containing all General MIDI instruments, constituting 31% of the GigaMIDI dataset, totalling 1,655,649 tracks.

This article motivates, describes, and presents the PBSCR dataset for studying composer recognition of classical piano music. Our goal was to design a dataset that facilitates large-scale research on composer recognition that is suitable for modern architectures and training practices. To achieve this goal, we utilize the abundance of sheet music images and rich metadata on IMSLP, use a previously proposed feature representation called a bootleg score to encode the location of noteheads relative to staff lines, and present the data in an extremely simple format (2D binary images) to encourage rapid exploration and iteration. The dataset itself contains 40,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 9-class recognition task, 100,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 100-class recognition task, and 29,310 unlabeled variable-length bootleg score images for pretraining. The labeled data is presented in a form that mirrors MNIST images, in order to make it extremely easy to visualize, manipulate, and train models in an efficient manner. We include relevant information to connect each bootleg score image with its underlying raw sheet music image, and we scrape, organize, and compile metadata from IMSLP on all piano works to facilitate multimodal research and allow for convenient linking to other datasets. We release baseline results in a supervised and low-shot setting for future works to compare against, and we discuss open research questions that the PBSCR data is especially well suited to facilitate research on.