Continuous Melody Generation via Disentangled Short-Term Representations and Structural Conditions

Automatic music generation is an interdisciplinary research topic that combines computational creativity and semantic analysis of music to create automatic machine improvisations. An important property of such a system is allowing the user to specify conditions and desired properties of the generated music. In this paper we designed a model for composing melodies given a user specified symbolic scenario combined with a previous music context. We add manual labeled vectors denoting external music quality in terms of chord function that provides a low dimensional representation of the harmonic tension and resolution. Our model is capable of generating long melodies by regarding 8-beat note sequences as basic units, and shares consistent rhythm pattern structure with another specific song. The model contains two stages and requires separate training where the first stage adopts a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) to build a bijection between note sequences and their latent representations, and the second stage adopts long short-term memory networks (LSTM) with structural conditions to continue writing future melodies. We further exploit the disentanglement technique via C-VAE to allow melody generation based on pitch contour information separately from conditioning on rhythm patterns. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model using quantitative analysis of rhythm and the subjective listening study. Results show that the music generated by our model tends to have salient repetition structures, rich motives, and stable rhythm patterns. The ability to generate longer and more structural phrases from disentangled representations combined with semantic scenario specification conditions shows a broad application of our model.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables. in 14th international conference on semantic computing, ICSC 202

Modelling long- and short-term structure in symbolic music with attention and recurrence

The automatic composition of music with long-term structure is a central problem in music generation. Neural network-based models have been shown to perform relatively well in melody generation, but generating music with long-term structure is still a major challenge. This paper introduces a new approach for music modelling that combines recent advancements of transformer models with recurrent networks – the long-short term universal transformer (LSTUT), and compare its ability to predict music against current state-of-the-art music models. Our experiments are designed to push the boundaries of music models on considerably long music sequences – a crucial requirement for learning long-term structure effectively. Results show that the LSTUT outperforms all the other models and can potentially learn features related to music structure at different time scales. Overall, we show the importance of integrating both recurrence and attention in the architecture of music models, and their potential use in future automatic composition systems